ISBN: 0-88739-315-2
288 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 10/2001
Paperback Original
Price: $15.95
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Creative Spirit
Alexander Blackburn
In Creative Spirit, Alexander Blackburn explores the possibility that the mind itself, combining unconscious and intuitive thought with reason and with the mythic mode of consciousness, spontaneously effects alteration of our inner life and presents solutions to crisis. Offering evidence from myth and literature, as well as from new discoveries in neuropsychology, Creative Spirit restores to imagination its essential dignity and argues that literature is directly relevant to life.
The creative spirit shatters and reinterprets the fixed and already known, the predetermined codes. It opposes all the forms and forces of disorder and division, all that diminishes the freedom, the dignity, indeed, the authority of the individual human being. From the perspective of the creative spirit, the biologically unique individual is the mythogenetic center of meaningfulness and thereby in revolt against automatisms, idealogies, and tribal authorities. This perspective yields order and seeks to heal divisions of man and nature, man and God, and man against himself.
Review: "...these learned but accessible essays investigate the importance of the creative writer and literature, particularly in a society in which materialism and anti-intellectualism are rampant."
-Library Journal
"[A]n astonishing tour de force of considerations and evaluations from a thoughtful and well-informed mind. This is an intellectual banquet. . . a rare accomplishment, one that should be required reading by any writer, teacher of writers, or anyone else interested in the state of the literary endeavors of our culture."
-Clay Reynolds, Aesthetic and Literary Studies,
University of Texas at Dallas; Novelist
"Wisdom, awareness, and insight flash and sparkle from the pages of Blackburn's exciting discussions."
-Charles L. Adams, Professor Emeritus of English,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Bio: ALEXANDER BLACKBURN is the author of numerous books, fiction and nonfiction, among them The Myth of the Picaro; The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost; The Interior Country: Stories of the Modern West; A Sunrise Brighter Still: The Visionary Novels of Frank Waters; Higher Elevations: Stories from the West; and Suddenly a Mortal Splendor.
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