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Assault on Paradise
Tatiana Lobo
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Assault on Paradise vividly depicts the Conquistadores and the Church invading Central America, impoverishing one world to enrich another. In a fast-paced, bawdy, swashbuckling adventure in Central America of the early 1700s, Costa Rican novelist Tatiana Lobo lays bare the dark legacy of the Conquistadores and the Church. Through the central picaresque story of Pedro Albaran, Lobo dramatizes the intrigues of politicians and the Inquisition and the bloody battles between the native people and the invaders, while simultaneously presenting a reverent poetic recreation of indigenous cosmogony and mystical values which the natives seek to use to drive out the invaders.
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The Birds of Paradise
A Novel
Paul Scott
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India during World War II, this powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them.
 
A coming of age tale, The Birds of Paradise is the story of a boy and his childhood friendship with the daughter of a British diplomat and the son of the Raja. Scott artfully brings his young narrator’s voice to life with evocative language and an eye for detail, capturing the pangs of childhood and the bittersweet fog of memory with nostalgic yet immediate prose
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Child of Paradise
Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema
Edward Baron Turk
Harvard University Press, 1989

Marcel Carné symbolizes the period, approximately 1930–1945, when French cinema recaptured the creative vitality and prestige it had relinquished almost completely to the American film industry. The first critical biography of this director of classic films, including the epic historical romance Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), relates the saga of Carné’s meteoric rise in the 1930s and his decline from critical grace after the war.

Between 1937 and 1945 Carné directed a number of works that are now part of France’s cultural patrimony, most notably Le Quai des Brumes (1938), Le Jour se lève (1939), Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), and the best known, Les Enfants du paradis (1945). The artistic merit of these films is widely acknowledged; their significance, however, is not solely aesthetic. To know Carné and his films is to know how cinematic art responded to social and political events—to the period of French history that witnessed the Popular Front, the Front’s demise, the fall of France, and the Occupation. Edward Baron Turk discloses the incongruities between the director’s aesthetic of poetic realism and his professed leftist sympathies; he situates Carné’s questionable stance and activities during the Occupation within the broader context of an artist’s ethical responsibilities in times of war; and he examines the ramifications of Carné’s censure during the postwar purges for the director’s subsequent fortunes. Turk’s use of the psychoanalytic concepts of androgyny, masochism, fetishism, and primal scene allows us to understand more clearly how Carné thought and worked. Turk also addresses the representations and maskings of homosexuality in Carné’s films and the extent to which they have colored film history’s often ambivalent assessments of the director. The centerpiece of the book is an extended analysis of what is arguably the most famous and beloved of all French films, Les Enfants du paradis, scripted by the poet-screenwriter Jacques Prévert.

The book draws on unpublished correspondence from, among others, Jean Cocteau, François Truffaut, and Simone Signoret, and on interviews by the author with Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Mme. Jacques Prévert, Pierre Prévert, Claude Renoir, Alexander Trauner, Truffaut, and Carné himself. This portrait of Carné thus becomes the portrait of an age, a great age in the history of French cinema, albeit a tragic age in the history of France.

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Colonies of Paradise
Poems
Matthias Göritz, translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang
Northwestern University Press, 2023

The first book of poetry by Matthias Göritz to be available in English, in a translation by a renowned writer

Very few books of poetry by contemporary German writers are available to English-speaking readers. In Colonies of Paradise, acclaimed poet and translator Mary Jo Bang introduces the poems of novelist, poet, and translator Matthias Göritz, one of the most exciting German writers publishing today. The poems in this book, which originally appeared in German under the title Loops, take the reader on a tour of Paris, Chicago, Hamburg, and Moscow as they explore childhood, travel, and the human experience. Unsettling our expectations about adulthood, the book permeates the quotidian with a disquieting strangeness that leads us deeper into our own lives and histories. Göritz’s sly humor, keen insight, and artistry are brought to the fore in Bang’s careful and innovative translation, allowing an English-language audience to enter fully the intricate interiority of Göritz’s work.

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Dialogues in Paradise
Can Xue
Northwestern University Press, 1989
The thirteen stories of Dialogues in Paradise are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience.
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Dreaming a Paradise
Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid
Chitvan Gill
Seagull Books, 2023
The story of the people of Buland Masjid, a community of migrants in Delhi.

In Dreaming a Paradise, Chitvan Gill draws on years of research and photographic reportage to unveil the tales of individuals driven to escape poverty, violence, and despair in search of happiness and a place to call home. At the heart of this book lies Buland Masjid, an unauthorized colony on the Yamuna riverbank in Delhi, India, which thrives with restless industry even under the unyielding grip of poverty. The women and men of this colony recycle scrap, repair machines, manufacture clothes, run schools, and sell delicious food, breathing new energy into a once-desolate economy. However, beneath the surface lies a tale of urban planning gone awry, reflecting the comprehensive failure of those in power. Delving into the lives of those cast aside and walled off from India’s vast wealth, this book highlights the huge divide between modern India’s haves and have-nots, and the inherent contradictions in a nation grappling with its identity.

In a compelling exploration of humanity’s journey, Dreaming a Paradise reveals the triumphs, tragedies, hopes, and hardships of resilient souls seeking their own patch of heaven amidst chaos. From the eternal cycles of loss and discovery, we witness the formation of civilizations and the timeless yearning that defines the human condition.
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Earthly Paradise
Myths and Philosophies
Milad Doueihi
Harvard University Press, 2009

Paradise haunts the Biblical West. At once the place of origin and exile, utopia and final destination, it has shaped our poetic and religious imagination and informed literary and theological accounts of man’s relation with his creator, with language and history. For Kant, Paradise was the inaugural moment for the rise and progress of reason as the agency of human history, slowly but certainly driving humanity away from error and superstition. Nietzsche described it more somberly as the very embodiment of the conflict between humanity and its beliefs.

In Earthly Paradise, Milad Doueihi contemplates key moments in the philosophical reception and uses of Paradise, marked by the rise of critical and historical methods in the Early Modern period. How do modern debates around the nature of evil, free will, and the origin of language grow out of the philosophical interpretations of Paradise as the site of human history? How do the reflections of Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, and their contemporaries inform our current ideas about the Biblical narrative of the Fall? Is Paradise the source of human error or an utopian vision of humanity itself?

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From Plantation to Paradise?
Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789
David M. Powers
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers’s book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged; and both negative and positive contributions of the Catholic Church and the military to operas and concerts produced in the colonies. The author also explores the level of participation of nonwhites in these productions, as well as theatre architecture, décor, repertoire, seating arrangements, and types of audiences. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments, praise, criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers à visage noirs (with blackened faces) present a clear picture of French operatic culture in these colonies. Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of “patriotic theatres,” and their role in fostering support for the king, as well as the impact on subsequent operas produced in the colonies and in the United States.
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Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel
Saint Ambrose
Catholic University of America Press, 1961
No description available
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History of Paradise
THE GARDEN OF EDEN IN MYTH AND TRADITION
Jean Delumeau
University of Illinois Press, 1995
 
 
With erudition and wit, Jean Delumeau explores the medieval conviction that paradise existed in a precise although unreachable earthly location. Delving into the writings of dozens of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, from Augustine to Dante, Delumeau presents a luminous study of the meaning of Original Sin and the human yearning for paradise.
The finest minds of the Middle Ages wrote about where paradise was to be found, what it was like, and who dwelt in it. Explorers sailed into the unknown in search of paradisal gardens of wealth and delight that were thought to be near the original Garden. Cartographers drew Eden into their maps, often indicating the wilderness into which Adam and Eve were cast, along with the magical kingdom of Prester John, Jerusalem, Babel, the Happy Isles, Ophir, and other places described in biblical narrative or borrowed from other cultures. Later, Renaissance thinkers and writers meticulously reconstructed the details of the original Eden, even providing schedules of the Creation and physical descriptions of Adam and Eve.
Even when the Enlightenment, with its discovery of fossils and pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, gradually banished the dream of paradise on earth, a nostalgia for Eden shaped elements of culture from literature to gardening. In our own time, Eden's hold on the Western imagination continues to fuel questions such as whether land should be conserved or exploited and whether a return to innocence is possible.
 
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Homeless In Paradise
A Map of the Terrain
Robert Rosenthal
Temple University Press, 1993

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The Kingdom and the Garden
Giorgio Agamben
Seagull Books, 2020
In a tour-de-force reinterpretation of the Christian tradition, Agamben shows that the Garden of Eden has always served as a symbol for humanity’s true nature.

What happened to paradise after Adam and Eve were expelled? The question may sound like a theological quibble, or even a joke, but in The Kingdom and the Garden, Giorgio Agamben uses it as a starting point for an investigation of human nature and the prospects for political transformation. In a tour-de-force reinterpretation of the Christian tradition, Agamben shows that the Garden of Eden has always served as a symbol of humanity’s true nature. Where earlier theologians viewed the expulsion as temporary, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin makes it permanent, reimagining humanity as the paradoxical creature that has been completely alienated from its own nature. From this perspective, there can be no return to paradise, only the hope for the messianic kingdom. Yet there have always been thinkers who rebelled against this idea, and Agamben highlights two major examples. The first is the early medieval philosopher John Scotus Eriugena, who argued for a radical unity of humanity with all living things. The second is Dante, whose vision of the earthly paradise points towards the possibility of genuine human happiness in this world. In place of the messianic kingdom, which has provided the model for modern revolutionary movements, Agamben contends that we should place our hopes for political change in a return to our origins, by reclaiming the earthly paradise.
 
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The Languages of Paradise
Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century
Maurice Olender
Harvard University Press, 2008

Michel Foucault observed that “the birth of philology attracted far less notice in the Western mind than did the birth of biology or political economy.” In this penetrating exploration of the origin of the discipline, Maurice Olender shows that philology left an indelible mark on Western visions of history and contributed directly to some of the most horrifying ideologies of the twentieth century.

The comparative study of languages was inspired by Renaissance debates over what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden. By the eighteenth century scholars were persuaded that European languages shared a common ancestor. With the adoption of positivist, “scientific” methods in the nineteenth century, the hunt for the language of Eden and the search for a European Ursprache diverged. Yet the desire to reconcile historical causality with divine purpose remained.

Because the Indo-European languages clearly had a separate line of descent from the biblical tongues, the practitioners of the new science of philology (many of whom had received their linguistic training from the Church) turned their scholarship to the task of justifying the ascendance of European Christianity to the principal role in Providential history. To accomplish this they invented a pair of concepts—Aryan and Semitic—that by the end of the century had embarked on ideological and political careers far outside philology. Supposed characteristics of the respective languages were assigned to the peoples who spoke them: thus the Semitic peoples (primarily the Jews) were, like their language, passive, static, and immobile, while the Aryans (principally Western Europeans) became the active, dynamic Chosen People of the future.

Olender traces the development of these concepts through the work of J. G. Herder, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Max Müller, Adolphe Pictet, Rudolph Grau, and Ignaz Goldziher. He shows that, despite their different approaches, each of these men struggled more or less purposefully “to join romanticism with positivism in an effort to preserve a common allegiance to the doctrines of Providence.”

With erudition and elegance, Olender restores the complexity and internal contradictions of their ideas and recreates the intellectual climate in which they flourished.

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Lost Cities Go to Paradise
Las Ciudades Perdidas Van al Paraíso
Alicia Borinsky
Swan Isle Press, 2014
In Lost Cities Go to Paradise, poetry breaks into song and poetic prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life. Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters, snapshots, and vignettes, this collection of quick-witted poems and short fiction mixes deceit and conceit with moments of tenderness and the elusive nature of humanity, asking if identity is more than a festival of masks and self-invention.
           
At the center of Borinsky’s work are the cities, which are a masquerade of disaster and spectacle that moves through space and time. Within these cities reside a man with two bills who gives three out of generosity, a woman who hides her face so that she may be better seen, cheating lovers who betray only to end up entwined in a tango, and immigrants who borrow each other’s accents. Filled with energy and irreverence, Lost Cities Go to Paradise captures the indignities and excitement of living among others in a society and discovering what is valued—and all that is not.
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Mapping Paradise
A History of Heaven on Earth
Alessandro Scafi
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Throughout history, humans have searched for paradise. When early Christians adopted the Hebrew Bible, and with it the story of Genesis, the Garden of Eden became an idyllic habitat for all mankind. Medieval Christians believed this paradise was a place on earth, different from this world and yet part of it, situated in real geography and indicated on maps. From the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the mapping of paradise validated the authority of holy scripture and supported Christian faith. But from the early nineteenth century onwards, the question of the exact location of paradise was left not to theologians but to the layman. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is still no end to the stream of theories on the location of the former Garden of Eden.

Mapping Paradise is a history of the cartography of paradise that journeys from the beginning of Christianity to the present day. Instead of dismissing the medieval belief in a paradise on earth as a picturesque legend and the cartography of paradise as an example of the period’s many superstitions, Alessandro Scafi explores the intellectual conditions that made the medieval mapping of paradise possible. The challenge for mapmakers, Scafi argues, was to make visible a place that was geographically inaccessible and yet real, remote in time and yet still the scene of an essential episode of the history of salvation. Mapping Paradise also accounts for the transformations, in both theological doctrine and cartographical practice, that brought about the decline of the belief in a terrestrial paradise and the emergence of the new historical and regional mapping of the Garden of Eden that began at the time of the Reformation and still continues today.

The first book to show how paradise has been expressed in cartographic form throughout two millennia, Mapping Paradise reveals how the most deeply reflective thoughts about the ultimate destiny of all human life have been molded and remolded, generation by generation.

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Maps of Paradise
Alessandro Scafi
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Where is paradise? It always seems to be elsewhere, inaccessible, outside of time. Either it existed yesterday or it will return tomorrow; it may be just around the corner, on a remote island, beyond the sea. Across a wide range of cultures, paradise is located in the distant past, in a longed-for future, in remote places or within each of us. In particular, people everywhere in the world share some kind of nostalgia for an innocence experienced at the beginning of history. For two millennia, learned Christians have wondered where on earth the primal paradise could have been located. Where was the idyllic Garden of Eden that is described in the Bible? In the Far East? In equatorial Africa? In Mesopotamia? Under the sea? Where were Adam and Eve created in their unspoiled perfection?
           
Maps of Paradise charts the diverse ways in which scholars and mapmakers from the eighth to the twenty-first century rose to the challenge of identifying the location of paradise on a map, despite the certain knowledge that it was beyond human reach. Over one hundred illustrations celebrate this history of a paradox: the mapping of the unmappable. It is also a mirror to the universal dream of perfection and happiness, and the yearning to discover heaven on earth.
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Mark Twain in Paradise
His Voyages to Bermuda
Donald Hoffman
University of Missouri Press, 2006
For Mark Twain, it was love at first landfall. Samuel Clemens first encountered the Bermuda Islands in 1867 on a return voyage from the Holy Land and found them much to his liking. One of the most isolated spots in the world, Bermuda offered the writer a refuge from his harried and sometimes sad existence on the mainland, and this island paradise called him back another seven times. Clemens found that Bermuda’s beauty, pace, weather, and company were just the medicine he needed, and its seafaring culture with few connections to the outside world appealed to his love of travel by water.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Clemens’s love affair with Bermuda, a vivid depiction of a celebrated author on recurring vacations. Donald Hoffmann has culled and clarified passages from Mark Twain’s travel pieces, letters, and unpublished autobiographical dictation—with cross-references to his fiction and infrequently cited short pieces—to create a little-known view of the author at leisure on his fantasy island.

Mark Twain in Paradise sheds light on both Clemens’s complex character and the topography and history of the islands. Hoffmann has plumbed the voluminous Mark Twain scholarship and Bermudian archives to faithfully re-create turn-of-the-century Bermuda, supplying historical and biographical background to give his narrative texture and depth. He offers insight into Bermuda’s natural environment, traditional stone houses, and romantic past, and he presents dozens of illustrations, both vintage and new, showing that much of what Mark Twain described can still be seen today.

Hoffmann also provides insight into the social circles Clemens moved in—and sometimes collected around himself. When visiting the islands, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of socialist Upton Sinclair and multimillionaire Henry H. Rogers; with Woodrow Wilson and his lover, socialite Mary Peck; as well as with the young girls to whom he enjoyed playing grandfather.

“You go to heaven if you want to,” Mark Twain wrote from Bermuda in 1910 during his long last visit. “I’d druther stay here.” And because much of what Clemens enjoyed in the islands is still available to experience today, visitors to Bermuda can now have America’s favorite author as their guide. Mark Twain in Paradise is an unexpected addition to the vast literature by and about Mark Twain and a work of travel literature unlike any other.
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Panic in Paradise
Florida's Banking Crash of 1926
Raymond B. Vickers
University of Alabama Press, 1994

Panic in Paradise is a comprehensive study of bank loan failures during the Florida land boom of the mid-1920s, during the years preceding the stock market crash of 1929. Florida and Georgia experienced a banking panic in 1926 when, in a ten-day period in July, after uncontrollable depositor runs, 117 banks closed in the two states. Uninsured depositors lost millions, and several suicides followed the financial havoc. This volume makes use of banking records that were legally sealed for almost 70 years and provides a shocking story of professional corruption and conspiracy.

"An extraordinary and unusual book that makes an important contribution to our understanding of banking history and the general economic history oof the 1920s. The banking collapse in the Southeast is virtually unknown, even to specialists in banking and financial history. No one who is interested in the banking history of the United States will want to miss this book." -- Eugene N. White, Rutgers University

"An exhaustively researched pioneering study; brilliant investigative reporting." -- Jack Blicksilver, Georgia State University

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Paradise
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books, 2022

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

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Paradise
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books, 2022

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

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Paradise and Method
Poetry and Praxis
Bruce Andrews
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Paradise & Method: Poetics and Praxis collects nearly two decades of work on poetics by one of the pioneers of the "language poetry" movement.

Addressing poetics from a poet's perspective, Andrews focuses on the ways in which meaning is produced and challenged. His essays aim "to map out opportunities for making sense (or making noise)--both in reading and writing contemporary literature. At the center has been a desire to explore language, as up close as possible, as a material and social medium for restagings of meaning and power." Andrews analyzes poetics and the production of meaning; alternative traditions and canons; and innovative contemporary poetry, particularly its break with many of the premises and constraints of even the most forward-looking modernisms.
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Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain
Reading, Translating and Staging Milton in Communist Hungary
Miklós Péti
University College London, 2022
The role and reception of Milton’s work in Communist Hungary.

This book provides a detailed survey of the key responses to Milton’s work in Hungarian state socialism. The four decades between 1948 and 1989 saw a radical revision of previous critical and artistic positions and resulted in the emergence of some characteristically Eastern European responses to Milton’s works. Appraisals of Milton’s works in the communist era proved more controversial than receptions of other major Western authors: on the one hand, Milton’s participation in the Civil War earned him the title of a “revolutionary hero,” on the other hand, religious aspects of his works were often disregarded and sometimes proactively suppressed. This book highlights these diverging responses and places them in the wider context of socialist cultural policy. In addition, it presents the full Hungarian script of the 1970 theatrical performance of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first of its kind since the work’s publication, alongside a parallel English translation, enabling a deeper reflection on Milton’s original theodicy and its possible interpretations in communist Hungary.
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Paradise in Purgatory
The Eschatological Healing of Victims in the Catholic Tradition
Nathan W. O'Halloran
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
The claim of this book is that it is a precondition for Heaven that victims experience an eschatological healing of their other-inflicted wounds. Nathan O’Halloran, SJ, argues that the best theological space in which to locate this eschatological healing is in what he terms Paradise-in-Purgatory. The doctrine of Purgatory developed as a postmortem theological category for addressing sins committed after baptism and for which adequate penance has not been completed before death. In its full doctrinal articulations at Lyons II, Florence, and Trent, Purgatory is a doctrine concerned with personal, self-inflicted sin. Victims, on the other hand, require healing from other-inflicted sin rather than self-inflicted sin. For this reason, a certain expansion of this Catholic doctrine is required to make theological space for victims. O’Halloran argues that he has found that theological space within the Church’s ample tradition. The wellspring from which the doctrine of Purgatory emerged contains a richer content than has been represented thus far by conciliar definitions. Paradise in Purgatory maintains that the soteriological logic out of which Purgatory developed can be extended also to the postmortem healing of victims, and the soteriological logic of the New Testament supports this conclusion. Using as fundamental touchstones the wiping away of victims’ tears in the Book of Revelation, and the healing of Dinocrates through the prayers of his sister Perpetua in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, O’Halloran argues that victims must have an opportunity to experience full postmortem salvation from other-inflicted sin. The volume concludes that Purgatory can be theologically expanded to include a Paradise-in-Purgatory, i.e., a process that heals the other-inflicted wounds of sin which victims carry with them through death. The wounds of victims cannot be eschatologically discarded but must be subjected to the healing salvation which Christ came to offer.
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Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow
Our Minamata Disease
Ishimure Michiko
University of Michigan Press, 2003
In the early 1950s, numerous cases of organic mercury poisoning were discovered in the fishing villages around Minamata, Japan. Yet for decades after, victims of what is now known as Minamata disease suffered neglect, discrimination, and ostracism by Minamata residents, local government, labor unions, Minamata disease certification committees, and fishers’ cooperatives. Fifty years later, renewed efforts began to conserve the environment and reconcile with victims of poisoning, including a flurry of museum-building, citizen waste recycling campaigns, and conferences, symposia, and exhibitions. But this rapprochement in the 1990s took place slowly and with difficulty, as the pain of previous decades was still alive and aching.
Ishimure Michiko served as a key activist and spokesperson for the Minamata protest movement, producing over forty volumes of writings in various genres: docufiction, historical novels, reportage, autobiography, poetry, children’s books, and a Nō drama. Beyond playing an outsized role in organizing the Minamata struggle, Ishimure influenced the movement’s cultural history and memory and articulated its symbolic legacy.
Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is a powerful record of victims’ suffering and the movement to support them. Its lyrical descriptions of fishing villages and fishers’ way of life, as well as of the scenic beauty of the Shiranui Sea area, are among the most effective in contemporary Japanese literature. Paradise is a work of testimonial resistance literature—a militant, hybrid autoethnography featuring both a local community as a plurality of speakers and an autobiographical voice through which Ishimure plays an unassuming participant observer who insists on the accuracy, truthfulness, and necessity of her testimony.
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Paradise, New York
A Novel
Eileen Pollack
Temple University Press, 2000
We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, n 1970, when she is a nine year old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, she  tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt, running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.

In the course of that season, Lucy comes to realize her love for the hotel's black handyman, Mr. Jefferson -- and  the difficulties she faces in overcoming the barriers between them. She battles her grandmother's not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage her success, her parents' superstitious fear of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling.

On top of all this, Lucy must contend with the Hasid who buys the chicken farm next door, a cell of ancient Jewish Communist who foment a strike among Eden's overworked young staff, and a gay chef and a gay baker who want to prove to the world that kosher cuisine can satisfy the most sophisticated gourmet.

Among the novel's characters are Shirley and Nat Feidel, who barely survived the Holocaust but refuse to allow bitterness to rule their lives; Mami Goshgarian, the Eden's tumeler; and Jimmy Kilcoin, and Irish Catholic insurance adjustor who has earned a reputation as "the Don Juan of the Catskills" and is determined to seduce Lucy before summer's end.
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A Paradise of Blood
The Creek War of 1813–14
Howard T. Weir, III
Westholme Publishing, 2016
The War for an Idyllic Wilderness That Brought Andrew Jackson to National Prominence, Transformed the South, and Changed America Forever
In 1811, a portion of the Creek Indians who inhabited a vast area across Georgia, Alabama, and parts of Florida and Mississippi, interpreted an earth tremor as a sign that they had to return to their traditional way of life. What was an internal Indian dispute soon became engulfed in the greater War of 1812 to become perhaps the most consequential campaign of that conflict. At immediate stake in what became known as the Creek War of 1813–14 was whether the Creeks and their inconstant British and Spanish allies or the young United States would control millions of acres of highly fertile Native American land. The conflict’s larger issue was whether the Indian nations of the lower American South—the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—would be able to remain in their ancestral homes.
            Beginning with conquistador Ferdinand DeSoto’s fateful encounter with Indians of the southeast in the 1500s, A Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 1813–14 by Howard T. Weir, III, narrates the complete story of the cultural clash and centuries-long struggle for this landscape of stunning beauty. Using contemporary letters, military reports, and other primary sources, the author places the Creek War in the context of Tecumseh’s fight for Native American independence and the ongoing war between the United States and European powers for control of North America. The Creek War was marked by savagery, such as the murder of hundreds of settlers at Fort Mims, Alabama—the largest massacre of its kind in United States history—and fierce battles, including Horseshoe Bend, where more Indian warriors were confirmed killed than in any other single engagement in the long wars against the Indians. Many notable personalities fought during the conflict, including Andrew Jackson, who gained national prominence for his service, Sam Houston, War Chief William Weatherford, and Davy Crockett. When the war was over, more than twenty million acres had been added to the United States, thousands of Indians were dead or homeless, and Jackson was on his way to the presidency. The war also eliminated the last effective Native American resistance to westward expansion east of the Mississippi, and by giving the United States land that was ideal for large-scale cotton planting, it laid the foundation for the Civil War a generation later. A Paradise of Blood is a comprehensive and masterful history of one of America’s most important and influential early wars.
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Paradise
Poems
Stephen Gibson
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
In Paradise, Stephen Gibson's fourth poetry collection, we are taken on a journey through history and myth, wars past and present, public discoveries and private loss. As the reader confronts past horrors and present truths as well as the speaker's personal ones (an abused mother, a shellshocked father), it becomes apparent that the paradise sought-not in the hereafter but in the here and now-lies just beyond reach. It all ends, suggest these verses, with the understanding that behind everything we find nothing more divine than the human.
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A Portal to Paradise
Alden C. Hayes
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Arizona's rugged Chiricahua Mountains have a special place in frontier history. They were the haven of many well-known personalities, from Cochise to Johnny Ringo, as well as the home of prospectors, cattlemen, and hardscrabble farmers eking out a tough living in an unforgiving landscape. In this delightful and well-researched book, Alden Hayes shares his love for the area, gained over fifty years.

From his vantage point near the tiny twin communities of Portal and Paradise on the eastern slopes of the Chiricahuas, Hayes brings the famous and the not-so-famous together in a profile of this striking landscape, showing how place can be a powerful formative influence on people's lives. When Hayes first arrived in 1941 to manage his new father-in-law's apple orchard, he met folks who had been born in Arizona before it became a state. Even if most had never personally worried about Indian attacks, they had known people who had. Over the years, Hayes heard the handed-down stories about the area's early days of Anglo settlement. He also researched census records, newspaper archives, and the files of the Arizona Historical Society to uncover the area's natural history, prehistory, Spanish and Mexican regimes, and particularly its Anglo history from the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II. His book is a rich account of the region and more, a celebration of rural life, brimming with tales of people whose stories were shaped by the landscape.

Today the Chiricahuas are a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts and the site of the American Museum of Natural History's Southwestern Research Station—and still a rugged area that remains off the beaten track. Hayes brings his straightforward and articulate style to this captivating account of earlier days in southeastern Arizona and opens up a portal to paradise for readers everywhere.
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Punishment in Paradise
Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony
Peter M. Beattie
Duke University Press, 2015
Throughout the nineteenth century the idyllic island of Fernando de Noronha, which lies two hundred miles off Brazil's northeastern coast, was home to Brazil's largest forced labor penal colony. In Punishment in Paradise Peter M. Beattie uses Noronha as a case study to understand nineteenth-century Brazil's varied social and cultural values, especially in relation to justice, class, color, civil condition, human rights and labor. As Brazil’s slave population declined after 1850, the use of colonial-era disciplinary practices at Noronha—such as flogging and forced labor—stoked anxieties about human rights and Brazil’s international image. Beattie contends that the treatment of slaves, convicts, and other social categories subject to coercive labor extraction were interconnected and that reforms that benefitted one of these categories made them harder to deny to others. In detailing Noronha's history and the end of slavery as part of an international expansion of human rights, Beattie places Brazil firmly in the purview of Atlantic history.
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Rebels in Paradise
Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists
Bruce Laurie
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Long ago dubbed the "Paradise of America," Northampton, Massachusetts, is also known as the home of visionaries—from the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, father of the First Great Awakening, to George W. Benson, brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison and a founder of the utopian Northampton Association for Education and Industry. During the mid-nineteenth century the town became a center of political abolitionism and a hub in the Underground Railroad. In this book, Bruce Laurie profiles five rebellious figures who launched Northampton's abolitionist movement—Sylvester Judd Jr., John Payson Williston, David Ruggles, Henry Sherwood Gere, and Erastus Hopkins. Through their individual stories he traces the evolution of the antislavery movement in western Massachusetts and links it to broader developments in economics, civil life, and political affairs.

Northampton's abolitionists were a heterodox group, yet most were intrepid devotees of democracy and racial equality, idealists who enjoyed genuine friendships and political alliances with African Americans. Several even took the bold step of hiring African Americans in their businesses. They avoided the doctrinal rivalries that sometimes troubled the antislavery movement in other places, skillfully steering clear of the xenophobic nativism that infected Massachusetts politics in the mid–1850s and divided the Republican Party at large. Although a prohibitionist faction disrupted the Northampton abolitionist movement for a time, the leaders prevailed on the strength of their personal prestige and political experience, making the seat of Hampshire County what one of them called an abolitionist "stronghold."
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Storm from Paradise
The Politics of Jewish Memory
Jonathan Boyarin
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Storm from Paradise was first published in 1992. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Usefully complicating common sense understandings of history, catastrophe, loss, otherness, and possibility through reflections on contemporary Jewishness, Boyarin draws on Benjamins's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by a "storm from paradise" to constantly interrogate and recuperate the past, "without pretending for long that we can recoup its plentitude". The book's seven thoughtful essays are at times deliberately intangible but always worth reading. An important book for the rethinking of the relevance of Jewishness to anthropology and cultural studies." –Religious Studies Review

"An essay in the richest sense of that term, inspired by and modeled on Walter Benjamin's essays. Based on varied, diverse, and abundantly cross-disciplinary readings, it moves and builds, questions and interrogates, and ultimately convinces us that the Jewish experience with being the 'other' and, conversely and recently, with 'othering' is indeed relevant to theorists of contemporary culture." –Marianne Hirsch

Jonathan Boyarin is the author of Palestine and Jewish History, and co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin, of Jews and Other Differences and Powers of Diaspora.

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Strangers in Paradise
Impact And Management Of Nonindigenous Species In Florida
Edited by Daniel Simberloff, Don C. Schmitz, and Tom C. Brown; Foreword by Edward O. Wilson
Island Press, 1997
Invasive nonindigenous species -- plants and animals that have been introduced to an ecosystem from someplace else -- are wreaking havoc around the globe. Because they did not co-evolve with species already in the ecosystem, they can profoundly disturb species interactions and ecosystem function.The state of Florida has one of the most severe exotic species problems in the country; as much as a quarter of many taxa in Florida are nonnative, and millions of acres of land and water are dominated by nonindigenous species. Strangers in Paradise provides an in-depth examination of the Florida experience and of the ongoing efforts to eradicate or manage introduced species. Chapters consider: natural disturbance and the spread of nonindigenous species case studies of insects, freshwater invertebrates, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, birds, marine invertebrates and algae, and mammals methods of managing nonindigenous species including ecological restoration, eradication, "maintenance control," and biological control management on public lands the regulatory framework including the role of the federal government as well as state authorities and responsibilities Strangers in Paradise is the first comprehensive volume to address a large, diverse region and the full range of nonindigenous species, the problems they cause, and the methods and impediments to dealing with them. Throughout, contributors emphasize solutions and relate the situation in Florida to problems faced by other states, making the book an important guide for anyone involved with control and management of invasive species.
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Tell Mother I'm in Paradise
Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador
Ana Margarita Gasteazoro, edited by Judy Blankenship and Andrew Wilson
University of Alabama Press, 2022
The life and times of Ana Margarita Gasteazoro: political activist, clandestine operative, and prisoner of conscience
 
Ana Margarita Gasteazoro (1950–1993) was a Salvadoran opposition activist and renowned Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise:Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador recounts her extraordinary life story. From a privileged Catholic upbringing, with time spent studying and working abroad, Ana Margarita first became a member of the legal political opposition in the late 1970s and later a clandestine operative at work against the brutal military junta.

Gasteazoro recounts her early rebellion against the strictures of conservative upper-class Salvadoran society. She spoke perfect English and discovered a talent for organizing in administrative jobs abroad and at home. As the civil war progressed, she quickly became a valued figure in the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), a social democratic party, often representing it at international meetings. Against the backdrop of massive social oppression and the “disappearances” of thousands of opposition members, Gasteazoro began a double life as an operative in a faction of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Multitalented and energetic, she organized safe houses for fellow activists, transported weapons and equipment, wrote scripts for an underground radio station, and produced an award-winning documentary film. But the toll on her family life and personal relationships was heavy.

Ana Margarita was disappeared in May 1981 by the infamous National Guard and endured a nightmare 11 days of interrogations, beatings, and abuse. Through international pressure and the connections of her family, her arrest was finally made public, and she was transferred to the women’s prison at Ilopango. There, she and other activists continued the political struggle through the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador (COPPES). During her two years in prison, tested by hunger strikes, violence, and factional divisions, she became one of Amnesty International’s best-known prisoners of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise is a gripping story of a self-aware activist and a vital young woman’s struggle to find her own way within a deeply conservative society.
 
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A Thousand Pieces of Paradise
Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley
Lynne Heasley
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

A Thousand Pieces of Paradise is an ecological history of property and a cultural history of rural ecosystems set in one of the Midwest’s most historically significant regions, the Kickapoo River Valley. Whether examining the national war on soil erosion, Amish migration, a Corps of Engineers dam project, or Native American land claims, Lynne Heasley traces the history of modern American property debates. Her book holds powerful lessons for rural communities seeking to reconcile competing values about land and their place in it.

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Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World
The Serial Stelae Cycle of "18-Rabbit–God K," King of Copan
By Elizabeth A. Newsome
University of Texas Press, 2001

Assemblies of rectangular stone pillars, or stelae, fill the plazas and courts of ancient Maya cities throughout the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras. Mute testimony to state rituals that linked the king's power to rule with the rhythms and renewal of time, the stelae document the ritual acts of rulers who sacrificed, danced, and experienced visionary ecstasy in connection with celebrations marking the end of major calendrical cycles. The kings' portraits are carved in relief on the main surfaces of the stones, deifying them as incarnations of the mythical trees of life.

Based on a thorough analysis of the imagery and inscriptions of seven stelae erected in the Great Plaza at Copan, Honduras, by the Classic Period ruler "18-Rabbit-God K," this ambitious study argues that stelae were erected not only to support a ruler's temporal claims to power but more importantly to express the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time. After an overview of the archaeology and history of Copan and the reign and monuments of "18-Rabbit-God K," Elizabeth Newsome interprets the iconography and inscriptions on the stelae, illustrating the way they fulfilled a coordinated vision of the king's ceremonial role in Copan's period-ending rites. She also links their imagery to key Maya concepts about the origin of the universe, expressed in the cosmologies and mythic lore of ancient and living Maya peoples.

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Visions of Paradise
Images of Eden in the Cinema
Dixon, Wheeler Winston
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Depictions of sex, violence, and crime abound in many of today's movies, sometimes making it seem that the idyllic life has vanished-even from our imaginations. But as shown in this unique book, paradise has not always been lost. For many years, depictions of heaven, earthly paradises, and utopias were common in popular films.

Illustrated throughout with intriguing, rare stills and organized to provide historical context, Visions of Paradise surveys a huge array of films that have offered us glimpses of life free from strife, devoid of pain and privation, and full of harmony. In films such as Moana, White Shadows in the South Seas, The Green Pastures, Heaven Can Wait, The Enchanted Forest, The Bishop's Wife, Carousel, Bikini Beach, and Elvira Madigan, characters and the audience partake in a vision of personal freedom and safety-a zone of privilege and protection that transcends the demands of daily existence.

Many of the films discussed are from the 1960s-perhaps the most edenic decade in contemporary cinema, when everything seemed possible and radical change was taken for granted. As Dixon makes clear, however, these films have not disappeared with the dreams of a generation; they continue to resonate today, offering a tonic to the darker visions that have replaced them.

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Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits
The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women's Fiction
Maha Marouan
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Witches, Goddesses and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction explores African diaspora religious practices as vehicles for Africana women’s spiritual transformation, using representative fictions by three contemporary writers of the African Americas who compose fresh models of female spirituality: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat; Paradise (1998) by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison; and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé.
 
Author Maha Marouan argues that while these authors’ works burst with powerful female figures—witches, goddesses, healers, priestesses, angry spirits—they also remain honest in reminding readers of the silences surrounding African diaspora women’s realities and experiences of violence, often as a result of gendered religious discourses. To make sense of Africana women’s experiences of the diaspora, this book operates from a transnational perspective that moves across national and linguistic boundaries as it connects the Anglophone, the Francophone, and the Creole worlds of the African Americas. In doing so, Marouan identifies crucial shared thematic concerns regarding the authors’ engagement with religious frameworks—some Judeo-Christian, some not—heretofore unexamined in such a careful, comparative fashion.
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