Eternity

Abstract: Abstract Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished and beloved critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literature - with "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Textual chronology General introduction: Buddhism and civilisation history I - structures and processes: Part I. Nirvana In and Out of Time: Introduction to part I: systematic and narrative thought - eternity and closure in structure and story 1. The concept of nirvana 2. The imagery of nirvana 3. Nirvana, time and narrative Conclusion to part I: modes of thought, modes of tradition Part II. Paradise in Heaven and on Earth: Introduction to part II: utopia and the ideal society 4. Heaven, the land of Cockaygne and Arcadia 5. Millennialism Critical discussion: what is 'millennialism'? Premodern ideas and modern movements 6. The perfect moral commonwealth? Kingship and its discontents 7. The Vessantara Jataka Conclusion to part II: in what sense can one speak of Buddhist utopianism? General conclusion: Buddhism and civilisation history II - reprise: Appendices Bibliography Glossary Indexes.

Abstract: mother) which ensures the continuity of a patri-line. This involves the further paradox 'that, since men are always in principle members of property-holding units, their earnings being absorbed into these groups, women are the only individual property-owners in Chinese society' (p. 259). The assumption of a 'Chinese society' in which all these paradoxes exist is often thus asserted as an eternity. Certainly, it can be shown to obstruct the drawing of some of the logical conclusions from the complexity and contradictory tensions of the relations analysed. But the assertion is an article of a sociological faith no more questioned by

Abstract: Before I get down to those problems about time that seem to me relevant to ancient historiography, I have to eliminate a series of faulty questions, part of which at least derive from an arbitrary introduction of the notion of eternity into the historian's business; for this conception even in the form of eternal return is likely to lead to confusion and errors of various kinds.2 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." To the untutored eye of the non-theological reader this seems to be clear evidence that the priestly author of Genesis I knew that from the beginning of the world events followed each other in a chronological order. (The exact translation of the difficult Hebrew text is irrelevant to our point.) The same priestly author speaks of the first, second, third day, and so forth. "The wrath do thou sing, o goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles, . . . sing thou thereof from the time when at the first there parted in strife Atreus' son, king of men, and goodly Achilles." To the untutored eye of the nonphilologist this seems to be clear evidence that the author of the first book