Theme (narrative)

About: Theme (narrative) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 159511 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theme.

The Performative University: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in Academia

Abstract: This special issue assembles eight papers which provide insights into the working lives of early career to more senior academics, from several different countries The first common theme which emer

Dispute poems and dialogues in the ancient and mediaeval Near East : forms and types of literary debates in Semitic and related literatures

Abstract: In 1989 the University of Groningen celebrated its 375th anniversary. Near Eastern Studies, in one form or another, have been part of the Groningen curriculum almost from the beginning. For this reason the Department of Middle-Eastern Languages and Cultures decided to contribute to the anniversary celebrations by organizing an international Symposium and a Workshop on The Literary Debate in Semitic and Related Literatures. The topic of the Symposium and the Workshop was chosen and prepared by the members of the research programme "Disclosure of Semitic Texts". Since 1985 the literary debate in the Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac and Arabic language and literature has been a central theme within this Groningen research programme. Because the research group sees as one of its tasks to place the study of the literary and cultural heritage of the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East also in the wider context of its connection with Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, specialists in Byzantine and Mediaeval Studies were also invited to contribute to the Symposium and Workshop. The present volume contains the contributions presented during the Symposium and Workshop on The Literary Debate in the Semitic and Related Literatures. Some of the more important issues regarding matters of genesis, development and possible interdependence of the dispute poems, dialogues and related texts, which can all be subsumed under the general type of 'debate', are discussed in the introduction, which also reflects a number of points raised in the discussions during the Workshop itself.

On the Slogans of Republican Political Theory

Abstract: All the contributors to this symposium have their own particular thesis to defend, but they are united at the same time by their concern with a single overarching theme. They are all interested in extending what they describe as a ‘republican’ view of freedom and equality to encompass broader questions about human rights and the proper relations between states. I mainly want to comment on this attempt to expand the reach of republican political thought. But I also want to focus – more explicitly than any of our symposiasts have done – on the intellectual traditions from which they draw their sustenance, thereby seeking to illuminate what it might mean to describe their shared outlook as republican in provenance. Suppose we begin by recalling some of the classic statements of republican political theory from the heyday of the tradition in early-modern Europe. Consider, for example, Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discorsi, written in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512. Or consider some of the English writers most heavily indebted to Machiavelli, such as James Harrington in his Oceana of 1656, or Algernon Sydney in his Discourses on Government of 1694, or such later theorists as Richard Price in his Observations on Civil Liberty of 1776. It would not, I think, be too much of an oversimplification to say that the common features of the republicanism espoused by all these writers arose out of two basic commitments. Furthermore, as the republican tradition developed, these underlying principles came to be summarized in the form of two slogans, as I shall call them, that may almost be said to define the republican case. It is with these slogans and their implications that I shall mainly be concerned in what follows.

Ghosts of Exile: Doubles and Nostalgia in Vergil's "Parva Troia" ("Aeneid" 3.294ff.)

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of Aeneas9 visit to the "parva Troia" in Epirus (Vergil, "Aeneid" 3.294ff.), centered on the theme of "substitutes" and "doubles," and beginning with Andromache, the heroine of this encounter. With Helenus as a substitute for her deceased husband, Hector, Andromache is involved in a sort of levirate marriage. Moreover, she reacts to Aeneas and his companions as if they too were "substitutes," living persons who immediately evoke images of the dead, "doubles" for her lost loved ones (Hector first and foremost, and also Creusa and Astyanax). This makes Andromache perfectly at home in "parva Troia", which is itself a "double," a "substitute" for the city destroyed by the Greeks. Except that, like all "doubles," "parva Troia" is an insubstantial illusion, the effigy of something that no longer exists. This city and its landscape can only be "seen," not actually "inhabited." These Trojan exiles are thus victims of a syndrome very similar to "nostalgia" (a Greek word unknown to the ancient Greeks, dating to the early eighteenth century, and beautifully described in a remarkable passage by Chateaubriand). Helenus and his companions are "too faithful" to their vanished city; their destiny, like that of the dead, has been hopelessly fulfilled. Aeneas, however, is not allowed to become a prisoner of the past. Against his will, he must be "unfaithful" to his former city: he will not rebuild Troy. The companions of Helenus and Andromache suffer from an "excess of identity" (one way to define nostalgia). Aeneas, on the other hand, submits to the almost total loss of his own identity: except for the Penates, a highly significant, sacred part of the lost patria, which will contribute to the formation of his identity in a way similar to Helenus and Andromache9s own nostalgic cult of the image of Troy.

Virginia Woolf : the critical heritage

Abstract: This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.