Story Of Sin Research Articles

The Redemptive Implications of Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide

Waste Tide, Chen Qiufan’s debut sci-fi novel, has received growing critical attention. While most of the scholarship focuses on the explicit themes of globalization, post-human, cyborg, and alienation, the perspective of Christianity and the redemptive implications it reveals have not been given due attention. Christian stories and doctrines referred to in the novel are quite closely related to the theme of the redemption of the characters. By presenting the characters’ redemption journey with Christian principles, Chen Qiufan reveals their complex inner world and points out the ways to realize self-redemption. This paper argues that Waste Tide can be most meaningfully interpreted as a story of sin and redemption by utilizing the genre of science fiction. Love, forgiveness, confession, and atonement are emphasized in the novel to serve as the remedies for fallen humanity in a world of technological development and global capitalism. A thorough analysis of the Christian underpinning in this novel reveals Chen Qiufan’s strength in characterization and presenting important moral concerns in a world dominated by technoscience through the Christian voice.

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

Contamination and Consumption in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market: A Food Studies Perspective

The aim of this article is to analyse the work of the English poet Christina Rossetti from the perspective of Victorian gender norms directed at girls. In her poem “Goblin Market” Rossetti describes sisters Laura and Lizzie, whose idyllic existence is disturbed by the arrival of sinister goblin fruit sellers. While Lizzie maintains proper restraint, Laura greedily devours the juicy fruits, for which she is punished – she loses strength and sinks into apathy. She is saved only by the sacrifice of her sister, who risks her life to purchase more delicacies and feed them to the weakened Laura. The sisters’ fantastic adventures have been interpreted in various ways, from a story of sin and salvation, to one of food poisoning to an allegory of thecreative process. All these approaches, however, see the eating of sweet fruit as a form of transgression as a result of which Laura is banished from the idyllic self-sufficiency of their small farm, where the girls are not troubled by any sorrows. However, having learned the sweet taste of the fruit, Laura does not want to milk cows, feed hens and bake cakes without a word of complaint. Using the framework of food studies enriched with the tools of conceptual metaphor theory, the article argues that the contamination Laura suffers through forbidden consumption is not presented by Rossetti as unambiguously negative. This interpretation also becomes bolstered by comparing Rossetti’s piece with how other Victorian female writers defined the role of young women in relation to food, including especially the aspect of their apprenticeship to be housewives. In this view, the goblin fruit gains a new dimension: its consumption highlights the oppressive nature of the norms to which young women were subjected in the Victorian era.

Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets

Two thirteenth-century vernacular motets copied side by side in the Montpellier Codex tell a story of sin and repentance. In one a shepherd rapes a maiden, while in the other a penitent begs the Virgin Mary to forgive a great sin. The music of these two motets is nearly identical: one is a contrafactum of the other, and represents a conscious narrative continuation of the first. This article offers a close reading of this unusual pair of motets, interpreting their texts and polyphonic musical settings in the context of other motets, the pastourelle song genre, their liturgical tenor, the technique of contrafacture, the chanson pieuse, and the intertextual refrain repertory. The two motets constitute a medieval exploration of the boundary between seduction and rape, and the spiritual consequences of its transgression. Having placed the story told by the motets in the context of medieval attitudes toward rape in both legal and pedagogical spheres, I close by reflecting on the ethics of listening to artistic representations of violence for both medieval and modern audiences.

“I’m On My Long Journey Home”: Rhetorical Identification in the Bluegrass Gospel Singing of Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers

The gospel songs of Ralph Stanley offer solace by means of identifi cation with the singer’s losses and struggles, but they also offer a metaphoric framework of journey and homecoming found in many folk and country songs. The framework gives shape and meaning to the troubled aspects of life that make up much of the content of bluegrass songs, sacred and secular. Referencing Kenneth Burke’s early theories of rhetorical identifi cation and symbolic appeal, this study reads the inclusion of gospel songs in stage and recorded performance as a secularized means of self-definition: singers and listeners are linked as people with common origins and destinations. While expected themes of repentance and faith run throughout these gospel songs, the progressive form of home that is lost and then recovered sets up a secular analogy to the story of sin and redemption so common in American Protestant Evangelicalism. By scattering these songs throughout a bluegrass performance, the journey toward home becomes the pathway by which all the troubles of betrayal, heartbreak, conflict, and hard times are borne and transformed. In place of creed or practices of piety, all are invited to find common purpose in the experiences of disappointment, regret, and loss in the knowledge that they are on the “Long Journey Home.”

Charles Marsh, The Last Day's: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South

Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South Reviewed by Beverly Prestwood‐Taylor

Mirrors and Metaphors: Contemporary Narratives of the Wolf in Minnesota

This article serves as a case study of how contemporary residents of the Upper Great Lakes states debate the ethics and meanings of living with wolves. An overview of the challenges facing Minnesota wolf management is provided, and the results of a Q-methodology study are presented. The study revealed three primary factors, or shared belief systems, about wolf management in Minnesota. The idealist perspective tells a redemption story of sin and atonement, the institutional perspective endorses scientific management and rationality and the localist perspective promises justice, respect and acknowledgement for its champions. The factors are interpreted as narratives or latent myths that provide a set of tacit directions to its adherents about understanding the complexities of living among carnivores. The intricacies and unique logic of each of the three factors are discussed, and themes of consensus and disagreement are briefly highlighted.

The last days: a son's story of sin and segregation at the dawn of a new South

This uncompromising, heartbreaking memoir explores how good Christian folk acquiesced to the terror of the KKK and how the author's father, a prominent Baptist minister, eventually found the courage to share in the vision of a new South.. The Last Days is something entirely different in the literature of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This uncompromising, heartbreaking memoir shows how people struggled with the actual processes of integration. Seeking to come to terms with the haunting memories of his childhood and adolescence in the Deep South, Charles Marsh has crafted a gripping story of small-town Southern life caught up in the whirlwind of the civil rights movement and its fallout.