Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture

Description

Since the early 1970s, when Marina Warner reported from Vietnam and America, in startling essays like 'The Bitch Route 13', she has been one of the most challenging, subtle and profound commentators on the culture of past and present, unravelling our webs of images, ideas and beliefs, and making new and provocative connections. This resonant collection draws together essays written over twenty-five years, offering a wide-ranging retrospective of her developing ideas. Whether writing on literature, drama, film, opera, religion, politics, gender and language, Marina Warner displays a rare gift for blending historical and anthropological insights with deft and perceptive readings on individual works. Penetrating and illuminating, Signs & Wonders is not only a book of essays, but a collection of original marvels.

Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. From her early books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, to her bestselling studies of fairy tales and folk stories, From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman, her work has explored different figures in myth and fairy tale and the art and literature they have inspired. She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, and is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She was appointed CBE in 2008. www.marinawarner.com

Marina Warner's essays and lectures reveal a consistently honest and agile mind preoccupied with the powerful controlling fictions of our lives * Observer * She's a weaver of enchantments, each sentence a silken knot charming you further into her web of meanings * Independent on Sunday * Clever, witty, erudite and, above all, usefully explanatory, these signs and wonders are a literary cabinet of curiosities for our sadly desultory times -- Alberto Manguel * Sunday Times * As a leading explorer of a largely unchartered territory, Marina Warner is an impressive, inspiring but never intimidating guide -- Peter Stanford * Independent * She is a terrific writer and an original scholar -- Victoria Glendinning * Daily Telegraph *