Word: pagans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tess) and television (The Mayor of Casterbridge) was born in 1840 in a remote Dorset village. There, farmers, shepherds and artisans lived in a kind of Elizabethan time warp. But something dour and reductive in this son of a stone mason drove him back beyond morris dances to a pagan Britain haunted by ancient superstitions and druidic spells...
...ambitious, technically challenging first novel about personal and political betrayal. If the clang of metaphorical boiler plate rang in the reader's ear, so did the voice of new talent. Trust remains Ozick's only published novel. Her reputation rests mainly on collections of short fiction: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories and Bloodshed and Three Novellas. In these works, the author's philosophical and social overview narrowed and intensified. She could be outrageously satirical about current styles of New York life, but her more serious concerns centered on Jewish tradition and culture...
...Gates, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski and Truman Capote do not come to their party. They miss quite a scene. Among the uncelebrated guests is a Holocaust survivor who literally levitates the living room with horror stories. Lucy also rises to the occasion with a Christian-pagan vision rooted in agriculture, bacchanalia and fertility symbols. The reader is left suspended with images of unreachable men locked in "the glory of their martyrdom," and of the Holocaust as multiple Crucifixions in which "every Jew was Jesus." Not since Elaine dined alone has there been a stranger tale...
Although the Church intended only to retain pagan forms, it had a difficult time restraining the pagan spirit. Despite clerical protests and papal anathemas, Christmas in the early days preserved many of the worst orgies, debaucheries and indecencies of the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia. The clergy itself was whirled into the vortex, instituting a Feast of Fools so that "the folly which is natural to and born with us might exhale . . . once a year...
Spectacles like this undoubtedly led some people to question the purpose of the holiday, and, with the rise of Puritanism, Christmas's very existence was threatened. Regarding the good cheer as "pagan" and "Popish," England's Roundhead Parliament in 1643 abolished the observance of the day. The King protested and mobs attacked those who opened their shops. But Parliament adopted strong measures, and for the next 12 years Christmas as a general English holiday ceased...