Edgar Allan Poe, while one of America’s most popular authors, is also America’s most deeply misunderstood author. The French have long admired Poe for his mythopoeic powers, but Americans largely think of him as the Stephen King of his day, revelling in fright, horror, and nihilistic violence. Or, as one critic put it, “his tales are nothing more than complicated…
Great Britain, in the middle of the 17th century, became the site of a turbulent and destructive civil war, in which the rival armies were those of King and Parliament. Of the many historic personalities brought forth by those violent times, none has been so extravagantly praised or severely condemned as Oliver Cromwell, who rose from being a little-noticed Member…
From 800 to 1066, the people we know as “The Vikings” reshaped the history, politics, and culture of Europe, raiding, conquering, settling, and trading from Byzantium in the east to North America in the west, and Iceland to the coasts of Spain and Italy. 800 years later the rediscovery of their literature and mythology took European culture by storm, inspiring…
Enlightenment broke the Chain of Being, “untenanting creation of its God.” The Medieval Reason snapped through the clouds into the heavens, and eighteenth-century England wallowed in materialistic and utilitarian philosophy, “scoffing ascent / Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat.” The veil between earthly and heavenly things became an iron curtain, and material things were stripped of symbolical understanding…
For centuries, writers have drawn inspiration from the literary tradition as well as the living page of nature to shape their literary lives. But what about the composer? How does attention to nature as well as a deep understanding of folktales and myth affect a person whose first language is music? Join Querida Thompson as she guides us through Bedrich…
Why has nature been called the first book? And what does it mean to say that we must know nature to know stories? These are the questions we will be exploring in this webinar. It may be that this “book of nature” is the common tongue between us and an older age, and we must recover our eyes to see…
“The Inklings”—it is a name we love, and, for many of us, it conjures up a whole cosmos of worlds and imaginings. But when C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield called themselves “the Inklings,” they had something specific in mind. Despite their great differences in temperament and vocation, this circle of friends—which grew to include Charles…
By the time of Lewis Carroll’s death in 1898, Macmillan had printed over 150,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and over 100,000 of its companion Through the Looking Glass. The Alice books remain the most translated into foreign languages after the Bible and Shakespeare. It has become one of the most widely quoted books in the Western world. There were…
“You refer to the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the Force. You believe it’s this boy?” During the production of the original Star Wars series, writer/director George Lucas conceived of a score of other films about the mythological beginnings of his 20th century medieval romance, chronicling the origins of the villainous Darth Vader and his fall…
In 1897, in a small town in the north of France, there ended the life of a young woman known to almost nobody. Her existence had not been marked by any visible greatness or any exceptional act. Within a few decades of her death, a pope would describe her as "the greatest of modern saints" and her exceptional holiness would…
Plato's Republic stands as one of the most influential texts in the literary and philosophical tradition, and many of its key ideas still capture our imaginations. In this webinar, Dr. Anne Phillips will explore the background of the Republic and the flow of its argument, with a particular focus on the metaphorical and allegorical imagery that Plato uses to paint…
Just as the modern reader struggles with the loss of the shared literary, cultural, and imaginative landscape of the literary tradition, so has the modern listener lost touch with the imaginative language of music. C.S. Lewis says that it is the first duty of a reader to read the work like the original audience and this is no less true…
Select options
This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
