Mark Jay Mirsky's Books

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Did Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy as a young man in Florence sleep with Beatrice Portinari before and after her marriage? Did the poet travel after her death through Hell to find her again? The clues to this academic detective story, writes Mark Jay Mirsky, lie not only in Dante's earlier poetry, The New Life, or in The Divine Comedy, but in the Zohar of Moses de Leon, a Jewish text written some years before and based on Neoplatonic ideas similar to those that inspired Dante. Purgatorio and Paradiso, the second and third volumes of the Commedia, are inaccessible to most readers unfamiliar with the boldness of Dante's use of the philosophical debate in the Middle Ages. Does Dante's Commedia hint at his hope of intimacy with Beatrice in the Highest Heaven? In this book Mirsky distinctively traces the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, medieval theologians, Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy, and Dante's concealed autobiography in his work. It treats the Commedia in the spirit of its title, as a hopeful and comic vision of the other world.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

254

Publisher

Syracuse University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815630271

ISBN 13

9780815630272

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

'A Satire to Decay'

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

'A Satire to Decay'

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

286

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson

Published Date

ISBN 10

1611470277

ISBN 13

9781611470277

The Absent Shakespeare

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Absent Shakespeare

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

The Absent Shakespeare challenges the notion that Shakespeare is "faceless" in his plays. It opposes Borges's notion of Shakespeare as "no one . . . a bit of coldness," a Shakespeare who constructed a mythology based on "his own intense private life.".

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

182

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0838635113

ISBN 13

9780838635117

The Secret History of Dante

Unearthing the Real-Life Mysteries of the Inferno

By: Mark Booth

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Secret History of Dante

Unearthing the Real-Life Mysteries of the Inferno

By: Mark Booth

Mark Booth, author of the international bestseller The Secret History of the World, uncovers the real-life stories of Dante and The Inferno. Why does Dante describe the Inferno as a real place? What secret society did Dante belong to? What was Dante’s connection with the Knights Templar? What was his secret connection to militant Islamic sects? Here you will find hidden codes, passageways under the streets of Florence, mad monks, mind-bending drugs and terrifying underground rituals. Together they contain all the elements of a great thriller–greed, murder, obsessive love, betrayal–and they reveal a 2,000-year-old conspiracy: to rule the world. Perfect if you want to understand the mysteries that inspired Dan Brown's novel Inferno, or as a standalone initiation to one of the great turning points in occult history.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

174

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1476753113

ISBN 13

9781476753119

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

By: Mordekhai Nadav,Mark Mirsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

By: Mordekhai Nadav,Mark Mirsky

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were a majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and famous Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement, and a place where Orthodoxy struggled vigorously with modernity. The two volumes of Pinsk history were originally part of a literature created by Jews who survived the Holocaust and were determined to keep in memory a vital world that flourished for half a millennium. In this case, the results are extraordinary: no town of Eastern Europe has been described in such fascinating detail, invaluable to Jewish and non-Jewish historians alike. For the second volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1881-1941.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

664

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

080474159X

ISBN 13

9780804741590

Like Joseph in Beauty

Yemeni Vernacular Poetry and Arab-Jewish Symbiosis

By: Mark S. Wagner

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Like Joseph in Beauty

Yemeni Vernacular Poetry and Arab-Jewish Symbiosis

By: Mark S. Wagner

This book traces the evolution of an Arabic poetic form called a oeHumayni poetry.a The book addresses the connections between the Humayni poetry of Yemen and the sacred poetry of Jews from Yemen, a hitherto-neglected chapter in the history of Arabic and Jewish literatures.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

373

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004168400

ISBN 13

9789004168404

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

By: Mark Jay Mirsky

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

254

Publisher

Syracuse University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815630271

ISBN 13

9780815630272

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

"A Satire to Decay"

By: Mark Mirsky

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

"A Satire to Decay"

By: Mark Mirsky

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets: "A Satire to Decay" is a work of detective scholarship. Unable to believe that England's great dramatist would publish a sequence of sonnets without a plot, Mark Jay Mirsky-novelist, playwright, and professor of English, proposes a solution to a riddle that has frustrated scholars and poets alike. Arguing that the Sonnets are not just a "higgledy piggledy" collection of poems but were put in order by Shakespeare himself, and drawing on the insights of several of the Sonnets' foremost contemporary scholars, Mirsky examines the Sonnets poem by poem to ask what is the story of the whole. Mirsky takes Shakespeare at his own word in Sonnet 100, where the poet, tongue in cheek, advises his lover to regard"time's spoils"-in this case, "any wrinkle graven" in his cheek-as but "a satire to decay." The comfort is obviously double-edged, but it can also be read as a mirror of Shakespeare's "satire" on himself, as if to praise his own wrinkles, and reflects thepoet's intention in assembling the Sonnets to satirize the playwright's own "decay" as a man and a lover. In a parody of sonnet sequences written by his fellow poets Spenser and Daniel, Shakespeare's mordant wit conceals a bitter laugh at his ownromantic life. The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets demonstrates the playwright's wish to capture the drama of the sexual betrayal as he experienced it in a triangle of friendship and eroticism with a man and a woman. It is a plot, however, that theplaywright does not want to advertise too widely and conceals in the 1609 Quarto from all but a very few. Despite Shakespeare's moments of despair at his male friend's betrayal and the poet's cursing at the sexual promiscuity of the so-called Dark Lady, The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets sees the whole as a "satire" by Shakespeare and, particularly when read with the poem that accompanied it in the 1609 printing, "A Lover's Complaint," as a laughing meditation on the irrepressible joy of sexual life.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

285

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1611470269

ISBN 13

9781611470260

Book's by Mark Jay Mirsky

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Absent Shakespeare

The Absent Shakespeare

The Secret History of Dante

The Secret History of Dante

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

Like Joseph in Beauty

Like Joseph in Beauty

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email