Arcadia is the entrance to the awe-inspiring and terrifying realm of Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy, the Eleusinian Mysteries and Death. Julia, a solitary writer, disenchanted with life, discovers a pagan world on a side-street theatre of London's West End, a world packed with riddles and oracles ruled by the irresistible sensuality of a living god. A murder and a cryptic telephone call lead her to Daniel, the incarnation of the god Dionysus. Allured by his fascinating and indomitable personality Julia is placed on a stage of mythological magnitude enthused by desire, the power of tragedy and the invigorating impulse of the heroic. To stay in Arcadia Julia will have to face an enticing and ominous truth: Only those who are willing to break free and trespass the forbidden territory of the gods can defeat death. "When a god breaks into our lives and fills us with a desire to penetrate and be penetrated by the Ineffable, life becomes an adventure. In the face of death's inexorable triumph, the gods offer us a pact of mutual fascination. Only heroes can feel the power of their lucid gaze." "In Arcadia Samantha Devin succeeds in resurrecting myths we thought forgotten. It is a powerful, invigorating novel driven by the energy of philosophical thought." JAVIER SIERRA. Samantha Devin is the author of Black Bile and Heroica. Her novels have been translated into English and German.

The Spanish Arcadia analyzes the figure of the shepherd in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish imaginary, exploring its centrality to the discourses on racial, cultural, and religious identity. Drawing on a wide range of documents, including theological polemics on blood purity, political treatises, manuals on animal husbandry, historiography, paintings, epic poems, and Spanish ballads, Javier Irigoyen-García argues that the figure of the shepherd takes on extraordinary importance in the reshaping of early modern Spanish identity. The Spanish Arcadia contextualizes pastoral romances within a broader framework and assesses how they inform other cultural manifestations. In doing so, Irigoyen-García provides incisive new ideas about the social and ethnocentric uses of the genre, as well as its interrelation with ideas of race, animal husbandry, and nation building in early modern Spain.

As well as presenting articles on Neo-Latin topics, the annual journal Humanistica Lovaniensia is a major source for critical editions of Neo-Latin texts with translations and commentaries. Please visit www.lup.be for the full table of contents.

Throughout human history, people have imagined inanimate objects to have intelligence, language, and even souls. In our secular societies today, we still willingly believe that nonliving objects have lives of their own as we find ourselves interacting with computers and other equipment. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century—a period of great technical innovation whose effects continue to reverberate today. Exploring key works of art historians such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Alois Riegl, as well as architects and artists like Fernand Léger, Mies van der Rohe, and Salvador Dalí, Papapetros tracks the evolution of the problem of animation from the fin de siècle through the twentieth century. He argues that empathy—the ability to identify with objects of the external world—was repressed by twentieth-century modernist culture, but it returned, projected onto inorganic objects such as machines, automobiles, and crystalline skyscrapers. These modern artifacts, he demonstrates, vibrated with energy, life, and desire of their own and had profound effects on people. Subtle and insightful, this book will change how we view modernist art, architecture, and their histories.

"A disturbing, edgy thriller." "Word by word, like in a spell, the enigmatic mystery transcends the pages and bewitches the reader. An intense, mesmerising, well-crafted plot." On a thunderous night, Max arrives in Shimst, a remote village in the north of Scotland. Four bizarre words welcome him at the entrance of the seemingly deserted town: "Do What Thou Wilt". The next morning Max learns that the village is cut off from the outside world because of the storm. Confined within the mountains Max is troubled by visions of a past he doesn't recognize as his own. Something or someone is plotting against him, twisting his sense of reality. What terrifies him most is that the inner space is becoming as menacing as the outer space. He feels that his mind, and even his soul, are no longer a known territory, that shelter is out of reach... With its unnerving atmosphere and brilliant psychological probing, Black Bile captures the imagination of readers who soon begin to fear that there is no way back once they have plunged into the depths of their unconscious. "Samantha Devin weaves each paragraph with the icy calm of a Patricia Highsmith, as she builds a Gothic structure of inner horror. Black Bile brings elements to the labyrinths of our psyche that recall the obsessions of Ernesto Sábato and Edgar Allan Poe." DIARIO DE OAXACA "A disturbing stroll through the abysses of madness. Black Bile is a disconcerting novel shrouded in a dark, angst-ridden atmosphere. The thread of the plot unravels into a page-turner that grips the reader from the first paragraph. Samantha Devin subtly handles the genre, sustaining the reader's interest with twists and turns that become totally addictive." EUROPA PRESS "Getting to know reality becomes our worst nightmare." EL PAIS "Samantha Devin publishes her first novel in which she closes in on the vertiginous boundaries of mental illness and interrogates the very concept of reality." EL MUNDO

Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music. The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.