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8
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The narrator(s) of the Mahabharata
According to this article by Alf Hiltebeitel, the Mahabharata has "three interwoven frame stories" (page 4). What he calls the "outermost" frame is Vyasa's recounting of the story to five of his disciples. An inner "generational frame" has one of…
user392289
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Who are these crescent saints?
In the Decameron Day 2 Story 7, the protagonist is a princess of "Babylon" who has numerous sexual misadventures after getting shipwrecked on the way to be married. She is, I believe, suggested to be Muslim ("debarred by her law from the use of…
Rand al'Thor
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When did detective fiction become primarily about murder?
I was reading George Orwell's essay "Raffles and Mrs Blandish" and came across this quotation,
"Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all murders, and some of them do…
IglooMaster
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Is there an equivalent to Orientalism in Eastern scholarship of the West?
Orientalism (1978) is a book by Edward Said that established the concept of "orientalism", which refers to the Western depiction of aspects in the Eastern world.
Is there an equivalent to Orientalism in Eastern scholarship of the West? With…
sba222
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8
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2 answers
Reference to "Sensible Susan" in E. Nesbit's New Treasure Seekers?
E. Nesbit's The New Treasure Seekers contains what appears to be a reference to another book titled Sensible Susan:
So at the next farm, which was half hidden by trees, like the picture
at the beginning of Sensible Susan, we tied the pony to the…
Konrad Schroder
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8
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Was the Canterbury Tales directly inspired by the Decameron?
Both Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are 14th-century collections of short tales set within a frame story involving a group of people taking turns to tell stories one at a time. The Decameron dates to the early 1350s, and the…
Rand al'Thor
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8
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Was FitzGerald the first to collect the poems of the Rubaiyat together?
According to Wikipedia:
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian…
Rand al'Thor
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8
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1 answer
When and why did the practice of reading "Address to a Haggis" at Burns Night dinner originate?
Many people and institutions around the world hold Burns suppers on or close to Burns Night, 25 January. Part of these events is the traditional reading of Robert Burns's "Address to a Haggis"1, during or after which the haggis is sliced open and…
Rand al'Thor
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Was Neil Gaiman influenced by Heinrich Heine?
In my experience, Neil Gaiman's understanding of mythology and literature is exceptionally profound, and he is able to render stories with mythological resonance surpassing the work of most of his contemporaries, particularly in the groundbreaking…
DukeZhou
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What do the letters G and D mean in "The Trout" by Sean O'Faolain?
In the story "The Trout", there are two letters that I want to know what they mean.
One of the first places Julia always ran to when they arrived in G--- was The Dark Walk. It is a laurel walk, very old, almost gone wild, a lofty midnight tunnel of…
Arnelius
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What do the names of the Decameron characters signify?
The Wikipedia page for the Decameron claims (without citations) that:
Boccaccio himself notes that the names he gives for these ten characters are in fact pseudonyms chosen as "appropriate to the qualities of each". The Italian names of the seven…
Rand al'Thor
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Identify a children's book about a boy put on trial by bugs for his cruelty to bugs
Read this when I was in primary school in Sydney, Australia, early 2010s. It was probably a small chapterbook with some pictures. I'm pretty sure the author is Australian but I'm not sure if it was in something like Aussie Bites, a compilation of…
neon
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What does "Some people do the same by their religion" mean?
It says in Great Expectations
Mrs. Joe was a very clean
housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her
cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt
itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do
the same by their…
yogazefish
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8
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Book featuring John Dee's assistant and a Hungarian vampire lady
I read this short novel around 2014, in the UK, in English. The cover was dark pink or red, and the title was something that smelled like a ripoff of the Da Vinci Code.
One of the main (viewpoint) characters was an assistant of John Dee, I think…
Rand al'Thor
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8
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Who was Coleridge's "schoolman"?
In an editorial in his weekly magazine The Friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote:
Omnia exeunt in mysterium says a Schoolman: i.e., There is nothing, the absolute ground of which is not a Mystery. The contrary were indeed a contradiction in terms:…
Gareth Rees
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