The Dangerous Landscape

Download or read book Dangerous Garden written by David C. Stuart and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As our earliest ancestors migrated out of Africa, they encountered entirely new floras. By sampling these, they found plants that appeared to (and sometimes did) heal wounds, cure maladies, and ease troubled minds. This process of discovery continues today, as multinational pharmaceutical companies bioprospect in the globe's remaining wild places for the next tamoxifen or digitalis. The gardener and botanist David Stuart tells the fascinating story of botanical medicine, revealing more than soothing balms and heroic cures. Most of the truly powerful and effective medicinal plants are double-edged, with a dark side to balance the light. They can heal or kill, calm or enslave, lift depression or summon our gods and monsters. Often the difference between these polar effects is a simple change in dosage. Stuart chronicles the tale of how the herbal materia medica of healing and killing plants has sparked wars, helped establish intercontinental trade routes, and seeded fortunes. As plant species traveled the globe, their medicinal uses evolved over miles and through centuries. Plants once believed to be cure-alls are now considered too dangerous for use. Others, once so valuable that they sowed the wealth of empires, are merely spices on the kitchen shelf. David Stuart recounts engrossing human stories too, not only of the scientists, explorers, and doctors who gathered, named, and prescribed these plants but also the shamans, magicians, and quacks who claimed to possess the ultimate herbal aphrodisiac or elixir.

Download or read book Girl in Landscape written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

Download or read book Something Complete and Great written by Holly Blackford Humes and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel’s transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section “Translation” features writers that reflect on Cather’s curious devaluation of My Ántonia’s reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel’s vision of Ántonia’s acculturation. The second section “Tradition” defines Cather’s relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim’s consicousness. The third section “Transgender” analyzes Cather’s relationship to Hamlin Garland’s Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section “Transhuman” deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather’s vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section “Transition” discusses Lena Lingard’s presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community’s uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel’s centrality to women’s studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.

Download or read book A landscape of words written by Amy C. Mulligan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living on an island at the edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to examine the spaces of the North Atlantic region and contemplate how geography can shape a people. This book is the first full-length study of medieval Irish topographical writing. It situates the theories and poetics of Irish place – developed over six centuries in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes – in the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape, environmental writing and postcolonial identity construction. Presenting focused studies of important literary texts by authors from Ireland and Britain, it shows how these discourses influenced European conceptions of place and identity, as well as understandings of how to write the world.

Download or read book An Introduction to Landscape written by Peter J. Howard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiring deep emotion, landscape carries many meanings. This book follows the development of several threads of the concept of landscape as they have evolved across disciplines and across countries, leading to the European Landscape Convention and the designation of cultural landscapes as World Heritage Sites. The book introduces the key notions of landscape, such as landscape as meaning, as picture, as scale, as scenery and as place. It also considers the various factors which influence the way in which landscape is perceived now and in the past, with all of the senses. Finally, it looks of the various ways of protecting, managing and enhancing the landscape, taking into account a future of climate change. Beautifully illustrated and including 'capsules' in each section which provide fascinating insights into subjects from reading pictures, to mapping and GIS, through a discussion of the range of types of landscape to issues such as eco-museums, this book provides an excellent introductory overview for any students with an interest in the landscape around us.

Download or read book A Landscape with Dragons written by Michael D. O'Brien and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harry Potter series of books and movies are wildly popular. Many Christians see the books as largely if not entirely harmless. Others regard them as dangerous and misleading. In his book A Landscape with Dragons, Harry Potter critic Michael O'Brien examines contemporary children's literature and finds it spiritually and morally wanting. His analysis, written before the rise of the popular Potter books and films, anticipates many of the problems Harry Potter critics point to. A Landscape with Dragons is a controversial, yet thoughtful study of what millions of young people are reading and the possible impact such reading may have on them. In this study of the pagan invasion of children's culture, O'Brien, the father of six, describes his own coming to terms with the effect it has had on his family and on most families in Western society. His analysis of the degeneration of books, films, and videos for the young is incisive and detailed. Yet his approach is not simply critical, for he suggests a number of remedies, including several tools of discernment for parents and teachers in assessing the moral content and spiritual impact of this insidious revolution. In doing so, he points the way to rediscovery of time-tested sources, and to new developments in Christian culture. If you have ever wondered why a certain children's book or film made you feel uneasy, but you couldn't figure out why, this book is just what you need. This completely revised, much expanded second edition also includes a very substantial recommended reading list of over 1,000 books for kindergarten through highschool.

Download or read book Landscape’s Revenge written by Caio Yurgel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent—yet virtually unexplored—pathway to the authors’ literary projects. The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors’ works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors’ oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors’ prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality. By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser’s and Carvalho’s characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.