Things got serious when the creeper blew up the cafeteria. Hamid, Ant and Jaina just want to create epic builds in Minecraft. When a mysterious stranger gives them four foam swords, the three friends and their videogame-hating principal are transported into a world of blocks and thrown into an epic battle to save their favorite game. An army of Minecraft monsters threatens to rampage across the real world, destroying neighborhoods, terrorizing families and totally giving videogames a bad name. Together, Hamid and his friends must harness the power of their swords to fight the horde of zombies, skeletons and creepers. But first, they have to stop their principal before he makes a deal with the game’s ultimate dark force to destroy Minecraft once and for all. Grab your pickaxe, the Battle of the Blocks has begun . . .

The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tübingen School concreatively adopted Kant’s philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant’s philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the “chorismos” between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature. The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

A transdisciplinary reader on Luce Irigaray's reading and re-writing of Ancient Greek texts.

What occurs within coma? What does the coma patient experience? How does the patient perceive the world outside of coma, if at all? The simple answer to these questions is that we don't know. Yet the sheer volume of literary and media texts would have us believe that we do. Examining representations of coma and brain injury across a variety of texts, this book investigates common tropes and linguistic devices used to portray the medical condition of coma, giving rise to universal mythologies and misconceptions in the public domain. Matthew Colbeck looks at how these texts represent, or fail to represent, long-term brain injury, drawing on narratives of coma survivors that have been produced and curated through writing groups he has run over the last 10 years. Discussing a diverse range of cultural works, including novels by Irvine Welsh, Stephen King, Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland, as well as film and media texts such as The Sopranos, Kill Bill, Coma and The Walking Dead, Colbeck provides an explanation for our fascination with coma. With a proliferation of misleading stories of survival in the media and in literature, this book explores the potential impact these have upon our own understanding of coma and its victims.

Yet, despite all of this, their beliefs are strictly based on a fundamentalist Christianity in which every action is justified by the Bible.".

Ancient cultures were faced with two immense problems. Why is there something rather than nothing and why is the universe ordered rather than chaotic? To answer these questions, they invented cosmologies, which were also the basis of their religious beliefs. A person's cosmological and religious beliefs are always interdependent. The ordered universe of the ancients was divided into four: 1) the World (that we inhabit), 2) the Overworld (the sky and heavens that the gods inhabit), 3) the Underworld (that the dead inhabit), and 4) Dreamworld (the mysterious zone between sleep and death that connects the living, dead and the gods). This is the incredible story of these four worlds and how they have influenced the development of all human thought, right up to the present day.

Readers of the nineteenth century novel expected literature to be a form journalism and fictional history. They wanted to read about easily identifiable situations with a chronological, straightforward and easily discernible development of plot, familiar backgrounds and credible characters. About a hundred years later, the Victorian novel became the great tradition, omnipresent and reliable. However, today the age and the context are different, and novels need more substance, including such themes as memory, race and empire, sex and science, spectrality and the heritage industry or key issues like gender, sexuality, and postmodernism. All these elements are considered Neo-Victorian which, in spite of their novelty, do point to a certain Victorian “anchor”. This volume contains ten studies, the substance of which is the analysis of novels that, according to their date of publication, are products of the Victorian and Neo-Victorian periods as defined above. The authors investigate and discuss Victorian roots and characteristics, preserved or recycled Victorian themes, Neo-Victorian characters and motifs, or any other characteristics that may label them as Victorian or Neo-Victorian products.

An ancient evil wakes. Friend becomes foe. Herobrine’s invasion draws near. Twelve year-old Hamid thought he could handle any Minecraft challenge. But when a diseased magma cube infects his best friend and his school principal teams up with ultimate force of darkness, Hamid is ready to say Game Over. But the nightmare has just begun. Trapped in Minecraft and running out of time, Hamid, Jaina and their video game allies must race across the Nether to cure Ant, catch Principal Whiner and defeat Herobrine before his army of monsters invades the real world. Grab your pickaxe, the Battle of the Blocks continues . . .

Hamid is trapped. Herobrine roams free. Jaina holds the key. Twelve-year old Hamid is lost in the End, while his best friend Ant remains cursed and deadly. As Herobrine and his army of monsters storm into the real world, Jaina is the only hope to save the planet. That is, if the adults will listen to her. Grab your pickaxe, the Battle of the Blocks is far from over . . .

What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.Key Features*Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures*Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present*Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration*Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath