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Eclipse (Banville Novel)
''Eclipse'' is a 2000 novel by John Banville. Its dense lyrical style and unorthodox structure have prompted some to describe it as more prose poem than novel. Along with '' Shroud'' and ''Ancient Light,'' it comprises a trilogy concerning actor Alexander Cleave and his estranged daughter Cass. Plot and themes As the novel begins, protagonist Alexander Cleave, a 50-year-old, disillusioned actor, retreats to his empty childhood home for an indefinite period of introspection, leaving his wife Lydia behind. He seeks to uncover, as he says, "the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be" from years of accreted guises. Banville is concerned in this novel with "the elusive and unstable nature of identity." Cleave's ruminations, which take up the majority of the novel, engage with issues of the nature of selfhood In September 2012 Sharks began recording demos for a second studio album, which they hoped to finish writing by the end of the year. According to M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Banville
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work. Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, Italy made him a ' of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer. Born at Wexford in south-east Ireland, Banville published his first novel, ''Nightspawn'', in 1971. A second, ''Birchwood'', followed two years later. "The R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blastomere
In biology, a blastomere is a type of cell produced by cell division (cleavage) of the zygote after fertilization; blastomeres are an essential part of blastula formation, and blastocyst formation in mammals. Human blastomere characteristics In humans, blastomere formation begins immediately following fertilization and continues through the first week of embryonic development. About 90 minutes after fertilization, the zygote divides into two cells. The two-cell blastomere state, present after the zygote first divides, is considered the earliest mitotic product of the fertilized oocyte. These mitotic divisions continue and result in a grouping of cells called blastomeres. During this process, the total size of the embryo does not increase, so each division results in smaller and smaller cells. When the zygote contains 16 to 32 blastomeres it is referred to as a morula. These are the preliminary stages in the embryo beginning to form. Once this begins, microtubules within the mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Observer
''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. History Origins The first issue, published on 4 December 1791 by W.S. Bourne, was the world's first Sunday newspaper. Believing that the paper would be a means of wealth, Bourne instead soon found himself facing debts of nearly £1,600. Though early editions purported editorial independence, Bourne attempted to cut his losses and sell the title to the government. When this failed, Bourne's brother (a wealthy businessman) made an offer to the government, which also refused to buy the paper but agreed to subsidise it in return for influence over its editorial content. As a result, the paper soon took a strong line against radicals such as Thomas Paine, Francis Burdett and Joseph Priestley. 19th century In 180 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Macfarlane (writer)
Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include ''The Old Ways'' (2012), ''Landmarks'' (2015), ''The Lost Words'' (2017) and '' Underland'' (2019). In 2017 he received The E. M. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is married to professor of modern Chinese history and literature Julia Lovell. Early life and education Macfarlane was born in Halam, Nottinghamshire, and attended Nottingham High School. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began a PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the college. Family His father John Macfarlane is a respiratory physician who co-authored the CURB-65 score of pneumonia in 2003. His brother James is also a consultant physician in respiratory medicine. He is married to Ju ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personal Identity
Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the person, persisting through time. In philosophy, the problem of personal identity is concerned with how one is able to identify a single person over a time interval, dealing with such questions as, "What makes it true that a person at one time is the same thing as a person at another time?" or "What kinds of things are we persons?" In contemporary metaphysics, the matter of personal identity is referred to as the ''diachronic problem'' of personal identity. The ''synchronic problem'' concerns the question of what features and traits characterize a person at a given time. Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy both inquire about the nature of identity. Continental philosophy deals with conceptually maintaining i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self
The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhood''—should, however, not be confused with subjectivity itself. Ostensibly, this sense is directed outward from the subject to refer inward, back to its "self" (or itself). Examples of psychiatric conditions where such "sameness" may become broken include depersonalization, which sometimes occurs in schizophrenia: the self appears different from the subject. The first-person perspective distinguishes selfhood from personal identity. Whereas "identity" is (literally) sameness and may involve categorization and labeling, selfhood implies a first-person perspective and suggests potential uniqueness. Conversely, we use "person" as a third-person reference. Personal identity can be impaired in late-stage Alzheimer's disease and in other neurode ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Light
''Ancient Light'' is a 2012 novel by John Banville. First published on 7 July 2012, the novel concludes a trilogy concerning Alexander Cleave and his daughter, Cass. ''Eclipse'' (2000) and ''Shroud'' (2002) were ''Ancient Lights literary predecessors in the Banville canon. Banville dedicated ''Ancient Light'' to the literary editor Caroline Walsh, whose recent sudden death had left him devastated. Plot and themes ''Ancient Light'' is narrated by Alexander Cleave, a 60-something year-old retired actor, and takes place 10 years after the death of his daughter Cass in ''Eclipse''. Cleave begins to record his memories of a first, unlikely affair he had at age 15 with Mrs Gray, a married woman 20 years his senior. "Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother." The book moves between memories of this affair and his current state of grief he shares with his wife Lydia, touching on themes of family, love, grief, and the reliability of memory. His solitude is interru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novel
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the histori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shroud (novel)
''Shroud'' is a 2002 novel by John Banville. It is the second book in the Alexander and Cass Cleave Trilogy, which also contains the novels ''Eclipse'', published in 2000, and ''Ancient Light'', published in 2012. Plot summary Axel Vander, famous man of letters and recently widowed, travels to Turin to meet a young woman called Cass Cleave. Cleave is a literary researcher who has discovered two secrets about Vander's early years in Antwerp. The first is that, in the years prior to World War Two, Vander contributed some anti-Semitic articles to a right-wing newspaper, and secondly, that he is not Axel Vander at all. He is Vander's childhood friend; he appropriated Vander's name and identity after the man disappeared and was presumed dead. Background The novel is partly inspired by two scandals concerning eminent academics that occurred in the 1980s: the posthumous discovery of anti-Semitic texts written during World War II by literary critic Paul de Man, who had an influential ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2000 In Literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2000. Events *February – El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore takes over the ''Teatro Gran Splendid'' in Buenos Aires, converting it for use as retail space. *February 13 – The final original ''Peanuts'' comic strip is published. *March 14 – Stephen King's novella ''Riding the Bullet'' is published in e-book format only, as the world's first mass-market electronic book. *September 26 – English politician and writer Jeffrey Archer is charged with perjury, and on the same day opens in the title role of his own courtroom drama, ''The Accused''. *December 15 – In a landmark censorship case, '' Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Canada (Minister of Justice)'', the Supreme Court of Canada rules that Canada Customs has no authority to make judgments on the permissibility of material being shipped to retailers, only to confiscate material specifically ruled by the courts to constitute an offence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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