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The story of the Flood, inherited by the Anglo-Saxons during their conversion to Christianity, was transformed by them into a vital myth through which they interpreted the whole of history and their place in it. The dual character of the myth, with the opposition between threatened destruction and hope of renewal, presented commentators with a potent historical metaphor, which they exploited in their own changing historical circumstance. This book explores the use of this metaphor in the writings of the Anglo-Saxons. It is the integration of a well-known biblical story into the historical and cultural self-definition of a group of people converted to Christianity and its worldview. The Flood in the Bible is clearly a punishment, though the sin is not so well defined. This forms part of a historical pattern of sin and punishment extending back to Eden, and progressed to the sin and exile of Cain. For Bede the historian, the Flood was a key event in the earlier history of the world; for Bede the theologian, the Flood was an event replete with mystical significance. In Exodus and Andreas all the poems share an interest in two themes, which emerge from the biblical story of the Flood and its theological interpretation: covenant and apocalypse. Noah is the 'one father' not only of Israel, but of the whole human race, and his introduction widens the concept of 'inheritance' in the Exodus. The book concludes with a detailed discussion of the significance of the Flood myth in Beowulf.
evil implicit in such easy binarism to suggest instead that The Satanic Verses is, from a cultural point of view, a work of meticulous religious attentiveness … [that enables] Rushdie to extend – with urgency and fidelity – his engagement with both cultural self-definition and Islamic historiography. 25 The very fact that the novel needs to commit the act of blasphemy, Suleri goes on to argue, demonstrates Rushdie’s ongoing attachment to the cultural system of Islam, because ‘blasphemy can be articulated only within the compass of
countries used to find the size and the resources they lacked on the continent. As EU boundaries move in the direction of Malta and Cyprus, an ever more populous and religious Middle East is feared as a dagger pointed at the soul of an older and depopulated Europe. Admittedly, Turkey and its neighbours in the Caucasus and Caspian region are hardly part of the Middle East. Yet a cultural self-definition of the EU pushes them away from the European landmass and conditions the debate surrounding Turkey and its meagre prospects for EU membership, notwithstanding the vague
in Anglo-Saxon manuscript art. Finding a precise definition of myth is difficult, though the general characteristics of a narrative classed as a myth can be articulated. This book is not about the theory of myth, but the integration of a well-known biblical story into the historical and cultural self-definition of a people converted to Christianity and its worldview. I use the word ‘myth’ to mean that
part of a Catholic minority in Presbyterian Scotland or, more simply, a desire to access and subscribe to the hugely positive discourse which now surrounds the Italian Scottish presence. Overall, the use of a ‘bi-cultural’ self-definition underlines the centrality of Italianness to the construction of personal identity amongst those who lived through the war in Scotland, as ~8~ Introduction underlined by one interviewee’s summation: ‘We all like the name “Scottish-Italian” but we’re Italian, just the same.’38 Although I am not of Italian origin myself, my perceived
heavily from the themes and motifs of the revival. Unionist people and Unionist institutions were dependent upon Celtic revivalism for cultural self-definition and artistic stimulus. The Unionist Convention of 1892 generated imagery which combined British and Irish cultural references: delegates to the Convention were greeted by Union flags and Irish language mottos; the souvenir medals produced for the
this, these works attest to the manner in which, as Piper puts it, the Romantic-era printed book both ‘participated in the making of the imagined communities of nineteenth-century nation states’ and ‘facilitat[ed] the emergence of what Karl Guthke has called a “world-spanning consciousness” around 1800’. 113 On the one hand, Roche's works educated readers about Ireland, even when not specifically about the country, and engaged in the kind of translation of political consciousness and violence to ‘cultural self-definition’ now identified with the national tale. 114
ritualistic vehicle for effecting this movement and a symbolic object upon which could be projected that which the culture needed to distance itself from most. It was thus bound up with cultural self-definition operating through a sense of what ‘we’ were not rather than of what ‘we’ were. The mask provided a way of grounding both deep-seated anxieties and values central to society’s ideas and images of itself
interweaving of earlier parodic lines into a cohesive net, netting more contradictions of eccentric culture through highly original, though wholly derivative, hybridized literary forms. Crossing poetic and prosaic forms, Pushkin clears the way for the privileged position of prose in nineteenth-century Russian cultural self-definition as well as for the poetic and composite forms of Russian modernism in the early twentieth century. The prosaic line, thicker, offers more capacity for contradiction, eclecticism and parody, in part because of the broader cultural basis, appeal