Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Donald Stone takes an innovative approach to the Victorian novelists, examining their debt to the writers of the previous generation. Confronting the diversity of the Romantic movement and of the Victorians' responses to it, he discovers strong and unexpected affinities between the novelists and the Romantics.
Even in an archrealist like Anthony Trollope, Stone detects an underlying sensibility that he traces to Byron's poetry and personality. He analyzes the writings of Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and George Meredith and discovers in each a redefinition of Romantic themes and values. The chapters on George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell are especially compelling because they demonstrate the ways in which the Romantic tradition created difficulties for women writers, and they show how these difficulties were or were not surmounted.
Stone's work illuminates in exciting new ways the individual writers and their novels. At the same time it throws light on the strengths and ambivalences of Victorian culture and on conflicts about creativity that still plague writers today.
Synopsis
The present work is the only complete translation into English of a Middle Persian text written about 955 A.D. which tells us about the legal problems of Zoroastrians living in Iran under Muslim rule. The form of the book is a series of dogmatic questions and answers which present a kind of compilation of Zoroastrian religious, social, and civil laws. The dialogue comprises some of the rules and institutions which grew out of and were intimately connected with the Zoroastrian religion that dominated Persian life and thought during the Sasanian era and also the period immediately following the advent of Islam.
Nezhat Safa-Isfehani has carefully compared other juridical works in Pahlavi with the present text and has taken into account studies on the present Rivāyat made by other scholars.