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Long before books were mass produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this impressive tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are fascinating stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humourists, Sappho and the empowerment of women's voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world. Vallejo takes us to mountainous landscapes and the roaring sea, to the capitals where culture flourished and the furthest reaches where knowledge found refuge in chaotic times. In this sweeping tour of the history of books, the wonder of the ancient world comes alive and along the way we discover the singular power of the written word.

Books --- Quests (Expeditions) --- History

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Quests (Expeditions) --- Male friendship --- Ontario --- Botanists --- Travel

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"One day Millennium Boy decided to grab his hobo stick, his bandana, and his Swiss Army knife, bid his mom goodbye, and head off on a quest for adventure. He is soon joined by his best friend Steve (weapon: baseball bat), and the duo find themselves victors in a battle with two other adventure seekers, which automatically upgrades their weaponry (a crowbar and a steel chain are added to their arsenal)-- and on they trek until they meet the next inductee to their group, the muscle-bound Lash Penis. And then things start getting weird. Joe Daly's latest graphic novel mimics the narrative propulsion of a role playing game, and therein lies its-- and its author's-- genius. Our jolly band of ne'er-do-wells journey blithefully along, confronting a series of hilarious but increasingly hostile menaces, accumulating points and weapons, eventually recruiting Nedgirl the Archer, who adds a little female energy to their improvisatory family of happy-go-lucky hooligans"--Page 4 of cover.

Adventure and adventurers --- Comic books, strips, etc --- Friendship --- Quests (Expeditions)

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"Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblem of shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals." Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's 'Travayled Pylgrime' and William Goodyear's 'Voyage of the Wandering Knight', the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal 'Pèlerinage de la vie humaine' was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed over the next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne.

Quests (Expeditions) in literature. --- English literature --- Quests in literature --- History and criticism.

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La Queste del Saint Graal is one of the best-known and most important of the medieval Grail Romances, being the first text to portray the character of Galahad the «perfect» knight, and the earliest extant version of the tale to attempt to fuse the dual tradition associated with the Grail: pseudo-Celtic and Christian. However, it is often considered a difficult text, containing passages of dense metaphor and a seemingly disjointed plot. This study explains the link between metaphor and structure within the text, by means of detailed analysis of certain key sections of the narrative, showing how the author has carefully constructed a hierarchy of characters. What also emerges is that the author places the reader in a position analogous to that of the questing knights, struggling to understand the adventures with which they are presented, and able to do so insofar as they have grasped the symbolic significance of earlier events in the story. The literary technique of structuring a text by means of metaphor is employed not only in La Queste del Saint Graal, but is characteristic of much medieval narrative: thus this analysis has implications for the interpretation of other examples of the genre.

Grail --- Arthurian romances --- Knights and knighthood in literature. --- Quests (Expeditions) in literature.