The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature

ISBN-10: 1400862140
ISBN-13: 9781400862146
Category: Literary Criticism
Pages: 293
Language: English
Published: 2014-07-14
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Author: Ricardo J. Quinones

Description

Era by era, from the writings of the classical Christian epoch up to East of Eden and Amadeus, from Philo to Finnegans Wake, Ricardo Quinones examines the contexts of a master metaphor of our culture. This brilliant work is the first comprehensive book on the Cain and Abel story. "Ricardo Quinones takes us on a grand tour of Western civilization in his admirable book, which reveals the riches of the Cain-Abel story as it develops from its Biblical origin to Citizen Kane and Michel Tournier. This is cultural history and literary criticism of the first order, finely written, formidably but gracefully erudite, and illustrating the capacity of Judeo-Christian culture and the modernity emerging from it constantly to criticize the darker side of its own foundations and realizations."--Joseph Frank "Ricardo J. Quinones skips Biblical and Talmudic exegesis to follow Cain and Abel through later centuries, from classical times to the present. What he uncovers sheds light on important shifts of consciousness and behavior in European and American culture. . . . Quinones writes with true eloquence and conviction. . . ."--James Finn Cotter, The Hudson Review "Quinones's study of how [the] three Cains were transformed by Romanticism and Modernism into a sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always necessary archetype of the modern world is literary and cultural analytic history at its very best."--Choice Ricardo J. Quinones is Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of English and Comparative Literatures, and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He is the author of The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Harvard), Dante Alighieri (Twayne), and Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton). Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Get the book

Similar books

Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. Levenback
I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar
... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. Clements
HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges
“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William Shakespeare
Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura Frost
In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura White
Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura Brown
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura Olcelli
D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender
... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...