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The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Selections Annotated and Explained Russell McNeil, PhD Editor, Malaspina Great Books In 1862 the English literary critic and poet Matthew Arnold described Marcus Aurelius as "the most beautiful figure in history." The Stoicism of Aurelius is grounded in rationality and rests solidly on an ethical approach rooted in nature. Stoicism promises real happiness and joy in this life and a serenity that can never be soured by personal misfortune. This philosophy has universal appeal with practical implications on problems ranging from climate change and terrorism to the personal management of sickness, aging, depression and addiction. I truly believe that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has much to offer us now...(Click on book cover for more)

Category:	Modern Theatre Modern Literature
Name:	Joyce Carol Oates
Birth Year:	1938
Death Year:	na
Representative Image:
Biography, Lectures, and Research Links:	Biography Blog Joyce Carol Oates SEARCH NOW: by title by author Born June 16, 1938 in Lockport, a small town in upstate New York. Her parents were Frederic and Caroline Oates. Oates began writing when she was 14. She attended the University of Syracuse after winning a writing contest. She later was awarded the Mademoiselle fiction prize (won also by Sylvia Plath). Several of her undergraduate papers were published in prestigious academic journals. She was then named Valedictorian of her class at Syracuse University. Oates went on to earn her master's degree at the University of Wisconsin. She has been on the English faculty at the University of Detroit (1961-1967), University of Windsor, Ontario (1967-1978), and the University of Princeton. She is married to Raymond Smith and together they own and run a small literary press and publish a literary magazine called The Ontario Review. An excerpt from A Reader's Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates by Greg Johnson describes Oates activities from 1978 onward: "Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history. Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart), novels of female experience (Solstice, Marya : A Life), and even a series of pseudonymous suspense novels (published under the name 'Rosamond Smith') that again represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist John Barth once remarked, 'Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map.'" Oates's novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang has been compared with J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Lawrence Hill writes that: "Foxfire charts the rise and the fall of a gang of poor, white teenage girls living in a small town in New York State in the 1950s. Raised in a community teeming with alcoholism, unemployment and violence against wonmen, the girls fall under the spell of a charismatic young leader. Initially, the girls bond for self-protection. They publicly humiliate a math teacher who sexually abuses one of his students. They beat up a man who is about to rape his adolescent niece. Elated with their first victories, the gang members soon spin out of control. They lose the ability to think independently, and they follow their leader on a path of increasingly violent and indiscriminate crime". Shortlisted on several occasions for a Pulitzer Prize, Foxfire has won rave reviews from critics in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and elsewhere, and like Catcher in the Rye a generation earlier, Foxfire has been targetted by several parent's groups as obscene and inappropriate for young readers. Oates has written a number of plays including The Perfectionist. [Adapted from Celestial Timepiece] The Great Books: Joyce Carol Oates Please browse our Amazon list of titles about Joyce Carol Oates. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about Joyce Carol Oates. Post Comments, Questions or Suggestions! This database is maintained by Malaspina Great Books.
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Records from Related Period and Category:	Modern Literature Modern Theatre

About this Database:

This web page is part of a biographical database on Great Ideas. These are living ideas that have shaped, defined and directed world culture for over 2,500 years. By definition the Great Ideas are radical. As such they are sometimes misread, or distorted by popular simplifications. Understanding a Great Idea demands personal engagement. Our selection of Great Ideas is drawn from literature and philosophy, science, art, music, theatre, and cinema. We also include biographies of pivotal historical and religious figures, as well as contributions from women and other historically under-represented minorities. The result is an integrated multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary database built upon the framework of the always controversial Great Books Core List published in 1940 by the late Great Books Pioneer Mortimer Adler (1902-2001). Most of the works on that list are available in the 60 volume Great Books of the Western World.