acclamation
bodily transformation
canonization
Category=QRAB
christianity
christians
cultural study
culture
elvis presley
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essay collection
exceptionalism
faith
glorification
glory
great honor
holiness
holy
humanities
joan of arc
mimicry
recognition
religion
religious studies
resistance
saint
saintliness
saints
self-fashioning
spiritual attainment
spiritualism
spirituality
stigmata
veneration
Product details
- ISBN 9780226519920
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity - categories that define the saint. In this collection, Francoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, "Saints" takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.
Francoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of five books, most recently of Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity, and coeditor of the journal Critical Inquiry. Jas Elsner is the Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago. Elsner's most recent solo-authored book is Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text.
