Soul Of Man Research Articles

Ecophobia and Social Class Identity: An Ecocritical Approach to the Nature/Culture Divide in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales “The Young King” and “The Star Child”

This article applies an ecocritical approach to the analysis of the nature/culture divide in Oscar Wilde’s “The Young King” and “The Star-Child”. These two tales contrast the realm of nature, embodied in the forest, and the realm of civilisation, represented by the city. Both stories focus on the protagonists’ journey from wilderness to the city, where not only do they need to become civilised subjects, but they are expected to govern as kings. This physical journey is matched by an internal one since both characters simultaneously undergo a transition from an animal-like state to a human one. I argue that these tales’ use of the nature/culture and animal/human dichotomies is closely connected to Wilde’s reflections about the Victorian social class system included in The Soul of Man under Socialism. Class struggle is indeed a major preoccupation in traditional folktales, where protagonists tend to magically escape from an initial disadvantaged position. Applying an ecocritical perspective to “The Young King” and “The Star-Child” helps to illustrate how these two tales manage to question the legitimacy of the hierarchical social structure by blurring the lines that separate the civilised subject from the animal one.

‘Horrible Enough to Stir a Man's Soul’: Enslaved Men, Emotions, and Heterosexual Intimacy in the Antebellum U.S. South

ABSTRACT This article analyses enslaved men's emotive responses to slavery's sexual economy in the antebellum U.S. South. It joins the growing historical literature on everyday forms of resistance and refusal, shedding light on the intimate dimensions of enslaved men's resistance. Using the framework of ‘emotional regimes’, this article shows that enslaved men strategically dissembled within, evaded, and defied slavery's culture of paternalism and strict emotional regime. It argues that enslaved men desired, sought, and valued strong intimate and affective relationships as an everyday life-affirming practice. While slavery's sexual economy routinely undermined enslaved romantic unions and emotional bonding, enslaved men typically showed their strength through vulnerability, emotional resilience, and emotional caretaking in intimate relationships.

ПОСТМОДЕРНІСТСЬКЕ ПРОЧИТАННЯ МІСТЕРІЇ «НАРОДЖЕННЯ ЛЮДИНИ. ДОБРО І ЗЛО НА СВІТІ»: СПРОБА СУЧАСНОЇ РЕЦЕПЦІЇ ФІЛОСОФСЬКИХ І ПОЕТИКАЛЬНИХ ДОМІНАНТ ІВАНА ОГІЄНКА

Ivan Ohiienko, as a historical and creative personality from among those who formed the idea of Ukrainianness at the beginning of the 20th century, during the active national liberation struggles, in contrast to the harmful utopian ideas of Bolshevism, needs special attention in the stormy present. The toolkit of literary postmodernism provides rich opportunities for rereading previously written works. In the case of the philosophical mysteries of Ivan Ohienko, we are talking about those texts that were not noticed by critics at the time of publication and did not receive a thorough ideo-logical and textual analysis. Therefore, the approach proposed in the current study is partly compensatory regarding the proper appreciation of Metropolitan Hilarion’s works. Therefore, the article attempts to reread Ivan Ohienko’s mystery «The Birth of Man. Good and Evil in the world» in view of those semiotic, structural and poetic markers that enable the modern reception of ideological markers in the direction of the postmodern worldview paradigm, dominant for the modern reader. The integra-tion of the text into the modern philosophical, cultural, historical discourse based on the technique of careful reading is a winning solution in an eff ort to reasonably give the author’s philosophical mysteries a new life, but not using far-fetched journalistic generalizations, torn from the fabric of the text itself. The proposed method of text analysis, based on the technique of close reading, made it possible to identify numer-ous features that fully or partially correspond to the creative searches of modern post-modern authors, namely: the idea of the relativity of truth, the fullness of human life with suff ering, the idea of the futility of trying to know the world, the futility of scien-tifi c knowledge of the world, the harmful infl uence of the crowd on creative individu-alism, the abandonment of man in this world, the lack of a clear distinction between good and evil, truth and wrong, in particular due to the appropriation of the right to produce the truth (often it belongs to the crowd or a representative of the crowd), etc. In the spirit of deconstructivism, the author involuntarily constructed replicas of the forces of Evil more convincingly than the fi nal plot decision in favor of the dominant and fi nal victory of Good. At least the situation in the world today proves that, unlike the plot of the mystery, Evil has not lost the fi nal battle for the soul of Man, but is still winning in an unequal existential struggle. The use of this type of text analysis can be useful for re-reading the texts of other literary fi gures, important in the paradigm of culture-creating and nation-creating Ukrainian continuum.

Attention to Human Dignity and Its Role in Increasing Spirituality

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate about the dignity of human and its role in increasing the spirituality in light of Islam. The founding shows that spirituality has been considered as a desirable thing throughout humans’ life and lots of effort have been made to strengthen it. There are several factors that raise and cultivate spirituality, but among these factors, human dignity has essential role and basis. In this research, while explaining the concept of spirituality, the importance of human dignity in creating a spiritual personality is emphasized, and how the influence of human dignity in increasing spirituality will also be investigated, and it is proven that the source of spirituality is paying attention to inherent and deprivations, neglect and lack of attention to the position and dignity of the royal soul of man.

The Philosophy of Education of Edith Stein and Augustine

This study demonstrates the comparative understanding of Edith Stein and Augustine on truth and love, faith and reason, and individual and community. Augustine tells us that we are pilgrims on this earth who are always in a constant search and discovery. In like manner, Edith Stein acknowledges that truth and love have an intrinsic relationship because truth must be accepted along with love and love with truth. Faith and reason also have an intrinsic relationship. When faith and reason become one, the truth becomes clearer and attainable. Edith Stein demonstrates the relationship and harmony of faith and reason. In the same way, Augustine believes that reason, which is incorporated in the nature of man, and faith, which is illuminated by the Divine, can control the evil that corrupts the soul of man. This article therefore attempts to contrast both ways of thinking and to study the possible similarities between them.

Private Worlds by Jeremy Seabrook: a response

This year, 2023, marks the sixtieth anniversary of Jeremy Seabrook’s authorial career as one of our finest and most impassioned writers on the nexus of the personal, the political and the global. And, it is just over three decades since he first wrote in Race & Class. With a depth and range that spans the life situation of the poor in Britain, the underprivileged and precariat of the Asian sub-continent, the impact of imperialism and consumerism on the psyche, the meaning of work, the impact of environmental disaster and the essence of what it is to be human – and a gift for striking prophecy – Seabrook’s career has been marked by the telling of beautifully expressed but often deeply uncomfortable and challenging truths. Yet always with immense feeling for the other at their heart. As expressed in his seminal piece, ‘The soul of man under globalism’ ( Race & Class 43, no. 4, 2002), ‘There are many macro-economic accounts of globalisation, but we rarely learn how it affects the psyche and sensibility of lives uprooted and radically reshaped by the penetration of their world by the market economy.’ We are therefore delighted to publish in this issue and this anniversary year, not only Jeremy Seabrook’s latest article for us, ‘The present imperium’, but also this response, by a contemporary, to his recently published autobiography, Private Worlds: growing up gay in post-war Britain (Pluto Press, 2023) which raises not only fundamental themes relating to the gay community in the UK and its history, but also profound, wider societal issues.

The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman

Reviewed by: The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by Jonathan Freedman Beth Newman (bio) The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman; pp. ix + 297. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $95.00, $30.00 paper, $29.99 ebook. What do Jewishness and late-nineteenth-century decadence have to do with one another? Depending on one’s conceptions of “Jews” and of “decadence,” the answer could seem to be not much—or quite a lot, none of it good. Influential late-nineteenth-century anti-Semites used the word decadent and its cousin “degenerate” as slurs with which to vilify Jewish people and foment hatred of Jews, a theme taken up as policy during the years of Nazi ascendancy. In The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Jonathan Freedman folds this fact into his rich, complex celebration of the decadent movement and its long afterlife, and the Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in both. [End Page 698] A prolific scholar of English and American literature, Jewish studies, and modernism, Freedman shows that Jewish people both adopted decadent themes and topoi to establish themselves as fully modern participants in the culture of major Western societies, and adapted them to specifically Jewish interests and preoccupations. He demonstrates compellingly that in doing so, they contributed to the shaping of an emergent modernism. Freedman makes this argument in seven chapters that are by turns erudite, gossipy, nuanced, funny, and moving. He stretches his canvas across the half-century or so that he calls the long fin de siècle from 1870 to 1920, extending it geographically from urban America to European centers of culture. Victorianists will be immediately interested in his first three chapters, which in different ways focus on the fin de siècle they know, surveyed from an unfamiliar angle of vision. The first chapter argues that the history of Jewish persecution, together with the Torah’s narratives of catastrophe and decline from Eden forward, created a receptive audience for decadent themes. Here, Freedman also constructs a network of Jewish critics, patrons, art historians, dealers, gallery owners, editors, and other taste-makers who provided a crucial infrastructure for the production and circulation of fin-de-siècle decadence. A chapter titled “Oscar Wilde among the Jews” explores the work of Jewish writers and artists whom Wilde championed as well as of those who championed him. These include Amy Levy, Ada Leverson, Julia Frankau, Marc-André Raffalovich, William Rothenstein, and Jacob Epstein, the designer of Wilde’s gravesite monument. Perhaps even more interesting is what Freedman discovers about Wilde’s popularity among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London and New York who flocked to performances of his plays in the Yiddish theater, and purchased translations of his works in Hebrew and Yiddish. He shows that Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries treated “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) as required reading at a time when Wilde was scorned by the mainstream reading public and press. A chapter uncovering the phenomenon of “Jewish Salomania” traces the enthusiastic adoption of Salomé by Jewish artists, dancers, and film actors (including Alla Nazimova of Charles Bryant’s 1923 silent film), embraced by them even before Wilde’s play added to the title character’s appeal. This chapter is lavishly illustrated, and Freedman pauses to provide compelling, often brilliant readings of the images, including of the 1897 Alphonse Mucha poster of Sarah Bernhardt that graces the book’s cover. In these chapters, as in the conclusion, Freedman serves as collector culling materials from a wide array of sources, arranging them into an often dizzying but unfailingly interesting and almost always entirely persuasive account that supports his thesis, each time from a different direction. Gender and sexuality, recurrent themes throughout, are central to one of the two chapters that crown the book: bravura readings of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Freedman observes that although Proust identified as Catholic, his mother was Jewish, making him Jewish in the eyes of rabbinic law. Even readers unfamiliar with Proust or the body of commentary on his vexed relationship to Jewishness...

Understanding Oscar Wilde’s Critique of Charity in The Soul of Man under Socialism

Charity is a voluntary act of alms giving to those in need. It is a moral virtue preached in all religions. Surprisingly, Oscar Wilde criticized it in his book, The Soul of Man under Socialism. However, a hermeneutic study of the book reveals that Oscar Wilde does not see charity as ontologically evil but as a veil to the evil of capitalism which is poverty. It does not allow the masses to have actual experience of poverty inherent in capitalism, which is very necessary for conversion from capitalism to socialism.

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's Mirour de l'Omme

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's <i>Mirour de l'Omme</i>

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England

Terms of Psychology in Ambai's 'Thanimai Ennum Iruttu' the two Psychological Forces

When a short story deals about the individual’s personal life then it can be called a personal short story. In personal short stories, the singularity of individual nature is predominant. Thus, there are some short stories where individual nature and social relativism are not given priority but both have an equal place or a parallel place. The mental image in them is not single primacy but duality. Two psychic powers are manifested in them. The reason for such differences may be the difference in the creator's view of life. Some writers see human behaviour through socio-cultural dependence while others see social dependence and individual nature together in human behaviour. The soul of man is not only influenced by social culture but also by some independent characteristics of human life and it is operated accordingly. The depiction will be according to the experience, vision, ideology and time of the short story writer. It is natural for writers who are trying to see the holistic trends of life to engage in such a variety of depictions. In that way, this article explores the difference between two desires in human behaviour.

All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

There is a Garden in her Face: The Georgic O’Keeffe

“The cooking has been done for you in the garden; it’s merely finished in the kitchen,” the English biodynamic gardener Alan Chadwick used to say. These were ideas that Georgia O’Keeffe, the American modernist painter, already had in mind when she decided to devote large attention to the creation of vegetable and fruit gardens in her houses in New Mexico between the 1930s and 1940s. When Chadwick, “the gardener of the souls,” started using his Biodynamic Method of organic gardening and farming in North America in the late 1960s, Miss O’Keeffe was already deeply engaged in an agricultural project that had seen her teaching, prodding, cajoling, and strictly guiding her many assistants and guests in New Mexico. Through her idea of hard work applied in any creative context, O’Keeffe anticipated, following the studies of Adelle Davis, an ecology of food instead of an economy. A strong believer in the energy coming from the patient and enduring cultivation of the earth, in its reproductive power comparable to the work and labor of childbirth, O’Keeffe used her adobe gardens, kitchens and cooking habits as a sort of mystical places where labor turned into blessing, giving birth to beauty. Through the reading of O’Keeffe’s letters and books inspired by her life and work, this article intends to analyze the beginning of an ecological, though aesthetically refined, politics of gardening and food in the hands and mind of the modernist artist. O’Keeffe nimbly moved from the stylish urban class-conscious foods and flats of New York City, in the first decades of the century, to the revolutionary culture of local production in the Southwest. In her garden cultivation and food rituals, O’Keeffe reproduced the spiritual landscape that nourished the body and the soul of men and women, both engaged in the prodigious creative project. In addition, her strong relationship with the Indigenous allowed her to rediscover the organic bases of civilization, the “sober reality” (Norman Brown) that helped her fulfill the meaning of her work: giving birth to beauty.

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler's Theological Position on the Nature of God

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler's Theological Position on the Nature of God

Captaining Men's Souls: Richard Hakluyt's Ministerial Works.

Richard Hakluyt, author of the major geographic compendium The Principal Navigations (1589; 1598-1600) spent much of his life in service to the English church, describing himself late in his career as 'one publikely and anciently devoted to God's service'. Despite this, his religious profession has often been viewed within scholarship as secondary to his geographic work, and the apparent absence of any explicitly religious writings has made the details of his own beliefs difficult to ascertain. This article sheds fresh light on both Hakluyt's religious beliefs and their importance to his geographic works through analysis of previously unexamined manuscript notes form the early 1580s. These notes cover a lecture focusing on the third article and a sermon exhorting the need for ministerial vocations, both given by Hakluyt while at the University of Oxford, and offer insight into his religious beliefs. The analysis offered in this article demonstrates the integral importance of religion to Hakluyt's geographic work while simultaneously locating him within a wide continental network of theologians and writers to reassess the impact and reach of his ministerial role.

Lift Your Voice

Lift Your Voice Richard Dale Sjoerdsma EDITOR'S COMMENTARY Click for larger view View full resolution Richard Dale Sjoerdsma Lift every voice and singTill earth and heaven ring,Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;Let our rejoicing riseHigh as the listening skies,Let it resound loud as the rolling seas.Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,Facing the rising sun of our new day begunLet us march on till victory is won. John Rosemond Johnson Upon first becoming informed of the 2022 World Voice Day theme, I must confess to have been taken aback by the lack of the typical adverb. In an overwhelming preponderance of sources that I investigated, biblical and poetic, the phrase included "up," or, as illustrated above by the lyrics to the song often referred to as the Black National Anthem,1 determiners such as "every" and "all." I am certain, however, that the WVD Committee intentionally avoided any qualifiers for the theme, and in so doing, encouraged intriguing possibilities for exploring its implications. Beginning in 2008—admittedly a little late to the party—in each March/ April issue of the Journal of Singing I have tried to draw attention to that year's April 16 World Voice Day commemoration. Since 2011, I have placed the theme on the cover of the periodical, and, upon learning the WVD theme sometime in October of a given year, have asked my regular contributors to consider addressing the theme in their respective columns, if appropriate. On the one hand, that practice lends a certain unity of content to the corresponding issue, while at the same time underscoring the importance of the observation; on the other hand, however, as the reader will determine in the pages of the current issue, my team has covered the topic so well, with perception, and from many diverse aspects, that the editor finds himself with little to add. Why is it important, even necessary, to lift one's voice? If the familiar adage that the eyes are windows to the soul is true, perhaps it also may be added that the voice is the expression of the soul. When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine; [End Page 431] But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous,and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;—Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,And wholly and joyously blends them.2 And if that is true, one must exercise the WVD imperative with care and responsibility. In both singing and speaking, a top priority must be the nurture and care of the voice so that one can engage or "lift" it effectively and efficiently. Voice practitioners need assiduously to concern themselves with matters of vocal and personal health, voice pedagogy, cognition, and many related issues that have been addressed thoroughly by professionals better equipped than I.3 While nodding in the direction of interpretations of the WVD theme that are more appropriate to this periodical, and while acknowledging with gratitude my colleagues' competent treatment of it, I want to venture on a different path. I do so with some trepidation, hearing the voice of friend and journalistic mentor Richard Miller, when, at the beginning of my tenure as editor, I sought his advice on writing a more or less regular commentary. Richard approved of the idea, but warned against using the column as a "bully pulpit." I fear I transgress his admonition on this occasion, but we find ourselves in unusual circumstances that warrant unusual responses. As I write in early December 2021, we have entered a time that inspires—indeed almost demands—lifting the voice, not only for those of faith, but for all. One week before the season of Hope, Love, Joy, and Peace—themes of the four Sundays of Advent—an unspeakable tragedy occurred in Waukesha, Wisconsin, only...

ЖИЗНЬ МОТИВА В ПРИХРАМОВОЙ СРЕДЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ МЕМОРАТОВ И ПОВЕДЕНЧЕСКИХ ПРАКТИК ДОМИНИКАНОК XIII–XIV ВВ.)

The article is devoted to the main motives of the nine so-called “sister books” that were created at the turn of the 12th–13th centuries in the Dominican convents for women in the south of the German-speaking region and were highly mythologized monastic chronicles. The mysticalascetic practices of medieval Western monasticism were built on the basis of several (marriage, passion, Christmas) motifs developed by the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux in a cycle of sermons on the biblical Song of Songs of King Solomon. Created in the middle of the 12th century, these motifs subsequently descended into the environment of common piety at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. In these three motives – marriage (nuptial), passionate (passionate) and Christmas (natal) – the mystical union of the soul of man and God (unio mystica) is allegorically described. Launched into circulation by Bernard of Clairvaux as conditional metaphors that accompanied discursive theological reasoning, these motifs passed through several stages in their development, until they finally became behavioral scenarios played out by Dominicans in everyday life, in the process of unfolding spontaneous performative practices. Through the efforts of the inquisitors (John Nider and others), such scenarios were rethought in the middle of the 15th century as constituent elements of witch cults.

KONSEP DAN FALSAFAH SASTERA ISLAM MENGIKUT MUHAMMAD QUTB

Muhammad Qutb was a writer and Islamic thinker. He believed that Islamic art (literature) is not necessarily the art of talking about Islam. Islamic art is not an advice, direct sermon, and insistence on the following goodness. It is an art that draws an image of existence from the perspective of perception (tasawwur) of Islam on everything that exists. It is a wonderful expression of the universe, life, and humanity, through the Islamic teachings of it. Islamic art is an art that finds the perfect interrelation between the beauty (al-Jamal) and the truth (al-Haq). Beauty refers to the reality of this nature, whilst the truth is the peak of beauty. The relationship between art and Islam is not a reluctance and hostility relationship. It is contrary to a group that assumes religion is related to truth, and art is only about beauty (al-Jamal). Many say that religion only focuses on ethics and morals. On the contrary, Islamic art rejects all constraints against it, including morals and attitude. Religion actually fulfilled the needs of the soul with art, and art meets the creed of the inner soul. The concept of Muhammad Qutb leads to the universal idea of literature (عالمية الأدب), and the commitment to art based on literary texts, and within the framework of Islam. The Quran is a major source of art, presenting a perfect vision of nature, life, and humanity, including the purpose of the arts itself. Islamic art is characterized by four attributes, namely divine truth, the universe, life, and humanity. These four attributes are the core of Islamic art, in addition to the Islamic teachings of existence that focus on realism, beauty, human emotion, destiny, and the truth of faith. All these are the things that turn the arts into giving life-packs and expressions that affect the souls of men.

The Superiority of Women in the Seventeenth Century

AbstractEarly feminist or pro-woman works often combine the claim that the rational souls of men and women are the same with an argument for the superiority of women. This article considers two such works, Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (Venice, 1601 [1999]) and Marguerite Buffet's In Praise of Illustrious Learned Women, both Ancient and Modern (Paris, 1668), in order to show the continuities and distinctive features of feminist arguments for superiority, to emphasize the differences in the conceptions of reason and physiology that distinguish them, and to demonstrate that claims of superiority persisted even as those defending women's worth began to adopt egalitarian positions.