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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

Amazon.com Price:  $13.97 (as of 22/04/2019 20:21 PST- Details)

Description

Stephen Greenblatt―Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning creator of The Swerve and Will in the World―investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories.

Bolder, even, than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity’s first parents. Comprising only some ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness.

Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and, in any case, so very “real” to millions of people even in the present. With the uncanny brilliance he in the past brought to his depictions of William Shakespeare and Poggio Bracciolini (the humanist monk who is the protagonist of The Swerve), Greenblatt explores the intensely personal engagement of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in this mammoth project of collective creation, at the same time as he also limns the diversity of the story’s offspring: wealthy allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, and one of the greatest triumphs of art and literature.

The biblical origin story, Greenblatt argues, is a model for what the humanities still have to offer: not the scientific nature of things, but fairly a deep encounter with problems that have gripped our species for so long as we will recall and that continue to fascinate and trouble us today.

16 pages color illustrations

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