Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The turn of the millennium found Western societies experiencing a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion. Whereas religion up to the Re- naissance provided the content for most high visual art and literature art and entertainment in our secular era have provided both the content for new religions and the moral framework for those who practice no religion at all. Even as serious literature and art are conventionally supposed to provide a sense of “transcendence” invented cosmogonies and pantheons from the humble genres of science fiction and fantasy now serve as the in- spiration for many New Age religions. In this book I focus on the way the larger mainstream culture via works of imagination instead of official creeds subscribes to a nonrational supernatural quasi-religious view of the universe: pervasively but behind our own backs. Consuming art forms of the fantastic is only one way that we as nonbelievers allow ourselves un- consciously to believe. Shakespeare’s worldview of the Renaissance-the worldview that holds there is another invisible world besides this one that our world of the senses is ruled by this other world through signs and portents that good and evil are physically embodied in our immediate environment is alive and well today in science fiction and supernatural horror films that build on a three-hundred-year tradition of the secularized supernatural and be- hind that on the millennia-old beliefs Western culture shares with older societies around the world. (SP)