Product Description: The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald, examines this British Victorian writer's employment of female figures to represent Deity. Such symbolism is extremely unusual for a Christian author of this period and anticipates the efforts of many modern theologians to develop an image of God as Mother...read more

(view table of contents)

This timely book treats Hardy's recurring use of one of the major informing myths of Western culture—that of a collision between a solar god and an earth goddess. Stave uses a chronological examination of Hardy's Wessex novels to highlight the author's evolving consciousness of the connections among patriarchy, Christianity, sexism, and classism. From the gentle affirmation of Far From the Madding Crowd to the grim Jude the Obscure, Stave paints a world in which the goddess figures die out, displaced by messianic gods, and a Pagan worldview gives way to a world devoid of spiritual meaning. (view table of contents)

"A wonderful book that makes a very big, new interdisciplinary argument. It will have as marked an effect on the field of medieval religious studies as anything published in the last few decades."--Nicholas Watson, Harvard University "Barbara Newman has always insisted upon the necessity of reading medieval culture as a text whose demands are matched by its rewards. . . . With

Product Description: This study delves first into the literary strata from which the archetypes have been culled, the stories of the Bible and the myths of the Aegean, to look at how the characterization of the goddess was revised as she re-emerges in contemporary fiction.

Product Description: Naming the Goddess is written by over eighty adherents and scholars of Goddess and Goddess Spirituality, and includes contributions from Selena Fox, Kathy Jones, Caroline Wise and Rachel Patterson. Part 1 is a series of critical essays focusing upon contemporary Goddess issues...read more

Product Description: Old Norse texts offer many different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women who occupy diverse social and economic positions or who have varying racial origins. Covering a much wider range of texts than have previous studies, this book presents a comprehensive and ground-breaking analysis of women in Old Norse literature...read more