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"Oracles Fiction."
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The tiger prince
When a tigress whose cubs were killed by hunters ravages villages, the king gathers his army but Lao Lao, a seer, advises him to send his son, Wen, to the tiger, instead.
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The shadow behind the stars
Chloe, Serena, and Xinot--the Fates--live on a secluded island spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of human life, but when Aglaia, a mortal, finds them, Chloe must try to keep her sisters from getting attached to the girl and involved in a dark fate that could unravel the world.
Book
The I Ching and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
This article addresses a gap in current Dickian criticism by undertaking a close reading of the twelve I Ching readings that interlace and undergird Philip K. Dick's celebrated breakthrough novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962). I argue that the I Ching is the device that (literally and figuratively) unifies the stylistic and philosophic dimensions of the novel. Following a summary of key critical approaches, I discuss the particularities of the I Ching as an oracle, followed by close readings of the novel's unique patterning based on its twelve core oracle consultations. This is postscripted by a discussion of the multiple implications for our understanding of High Castle. What is revealed are both the seams of physical construction of the novel and a set of synchronistic complementarities, alternating pairings, and other simultaneities that distinguish Dick's treatment of the uchronie genre from the classical diachronic and even Fredric Jameson's synchronic or Paul Alkon's “postmodern alternate history.” I conclude that despite critical ambivalence, including Dick's own, over its ambiguous ending, it is precisely this open-endedness, from which a multiverse of potential interpretations flow, that sustains the novel as an important one in modern literature.
Journal Article
The curse of Deadman's Forest
According to prophecy, a trip through the magical portal near the Dover, England, orphanage where Ian and Theo live will bring them to the third Oracle, a child with extraordinary healing powers to help defeat a great evil, but it will also lead to Ian's death.
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Mrs. DeVry, Why Do You Cry?
When he came a few months ago to re-hang the screen door, he brought a bunch of boxes in from his truck and put them in the nearly empty back room that had been my ex-husband's home office. Why did my grandfather sit up there alone and watch the train run round and round, winding through the hills and over the lake, past the farm and through the town, right by the yellow house where a pie is baking and a baby is napping and Mrs. Sylvia Anne DeVry, hanging out the wash, hears the train and mistakes it for the sound of a change coming?
Journal Article
Oracles of Delphi Keep
In 1938, three orphans--Theo, Carl, and Ian, ages ten to thirteen--lead three teachers through a portal that takes them from Dover, England, to Morocco in their quest to locate six silver boxes before the ancient prophecies therein are found by the evil Demogorgon's offspring.
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“The very idea of place”: Form, Contingency, and Adornian Volition inThe Man in the High Castle
In his essay “Commitment,” Theodor W. Adorno elaborates on the paradox of poetry (or any form of literature) after Auschwitz: literature as form must somehow persist despite its barbarity. To this end, he champions “autonomous” art, often understood as abstract or non-representational, against “committed” political art. Another way of conceiving autonomy, however, might be in the form of aleatory occurrences that make possible new realms of perception and thought. In Philip K. Dick's 1962 novelThe Man in the High Castle, the classical Chinese oracle, theI Ching, plays just such a contingent role by alerting the novel's characters to the fact that their history, in which Japan and Germany have emerged victorious from World War II, is untrue. ReconsideringThe Man in the High Castle, an sf novel that Adorno himself would have surely dismissed as unliterary, in light of his paradoxical aesthetics, and re-examining the relationship between history and chance in the novel, we can see how the aleatory becomes autonomous, opening up the formal enclosures of both the novel and history from within.
Journal Article
Ioláni; or, Tahíti as it was
Written 150 years ago, never published, and presumed lost for nearly a century, Wilkie Collins's earliest novel now appears in print for the first time. Ioláni is a sensational romance--a tale of terror and suspense, bravery and betrayal, set against the lush backdrop of Tahiti. The book's complicated history is worthy of a writer famous for intricate plots hinging on long-kept secrets. Collins wrote the book as a young man in the early 1840s, twenty years beforeThe MoonstoneandThe Woman in Whitemade his name among Victorian novelists. He failed to find a publisher for the work, shelved the manuscript for years, and eventually gave it to an acquaintance. It disappeared into the hands of private collectors and remained there--acquiring mythical status as a lost novel--from the turn of the century until its sudden appearance on the rare book market in New York in 1991. This first edition appears with the permission of the new owners, who keep the mystery alive by remaining anonymous.
The novel is set in Tahiti prior to European contact. It tells the story of the diabolical high priest, Ioláni , and the heroic young woman, Idüa, who bears his child. Determined to defy the Tahitian custom of killing firstborn children, Idüa and her friend Aimáta flee with the baby and take refuge among Ioláni's enemies. The vengeful priest pursues them, setting into motion a plot that features civil war, sorcery, sacrificial rites, wild madmen, treachery, and love. Collins explores themes that he would return to again and again in his career: oppression by sinister, patriarchal figures; the bravery of forceful, unorthodox women; the psychology of the criminal mind; the hypocrisy of moralists; and Victorian ideas of the exotic. As Ira Nadel shows in his introduction, the novel casts new light on Collins's development as a writer and on the creation of his later masterpieces. A sample page from the manuscript appears as the frontispiece to this edition. The publication of Ioláni is a major literary event: a century and half late, Wilkie Collins makes his literary debut.
Originally published in 1999.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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Inside paradise lost
Inside \"Paradise Lost\"opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint's comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books ofParadise Lostand to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects ofParadise Lost-its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice.
Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam's decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of thisParadise Lostis a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton's masterpiece,Paradise Lostreveals itself in new formal configurations and unsuspected levels of meaning and design.
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