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tree symbolism in literature: Old Growth Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2021-08 Articles about trees that have appeared in Orion Magazine. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Giving Tree Shel Silverstein, 2014-02-18 As The Giving Tree turns fifty, this timeless classic is available for the first time ever in ebook format. This digital edition allows young readers and lifelong fans to continue the legacy and love of a classic that will now reach an even wider audience. Once there was a tree...and she loved a little boy. So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein. This moving parable for all ages offers a touching interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return. Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave. This is a tender story, touched with sadness, aglow with consolation. Shel Silverstein's incomparable career as a bestselling children's book author and illustrator began with Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back. He is also the creator of picture books including A Giraffe and a Half, Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros?, The Missing Piece, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, and the perennial favorite The Giving Tree, and of classic poetry collections such as Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up, Every Thing On It, Don't Bump the Glump!, and Runny Babbit. And don't miss the other Shel Silverstein ebooks, Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic! |
tree symbolism in literature: Speak Laurie Halse Anderson, 2011-05-10 The groundbreaking National Book Award Finalist and Michael L. Printz Honor Book with more than 3.5 million copies sold, Speak is a bestselling modern classic about consent, healing, and finding your voice. Speak up for yourself—we want to know what you have to say. From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, an outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, Melinda becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back—and refuses to be silent. From Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award laureate Laurie Halse Anderson comes the extraordinary landmark novel that has spoken to millions of readers. Powerful and utterly unforgettable, Speak has been translated into 35 languages, was the basis for the major motion picture starring Kristen Stewart, and is now a stunning graphic novel adapted by Laurie Halse Anderson herself, with artwork from Eisner-Award winner Emily Carroll. Awards and Accolades for Speak: A New York Times Bestseller A National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature A Michael L. Printz Honor Book An Edgar Allan Poe Award Finalist A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist A TIME Magazine Best YA Book of All Time A Cosmopolitan Magazine Best YA Books Everyone Should Read, Regardless of Age |
tree symbolism in literature: The Ancient One T. A. Barron, 1992-09-16 When Kate travels to Blade, Oregon, for a quiet week at Aunt Melanie's cottage, her plans are dashed by the discovery of a grove of giant redwood trees in nearby Lost Crater. For thousands of years, no humans have entered the fog-filled crater--except possibly the Halami people, who lived in the region centuries ago before vanishing without a trace. Long a source of deep mystery, the crater is now a source of conflict, pitting those who see it as the dying mill town's last hope against those who see it as a rare sanctuary that should be protected. Caught up in this struggle, Kate follows an old Halami trail into the crater, and suddenly is thrown back in time five hundred years. Accompanied by the trickster Kandeldandel, the loyal Laioni, and the young logger Jody, she meets strange and enigmatic creatures, none more frightening than the volcanic Gashra, bent on destroying everything he cannot control. To defeat him, Kate must find the answer to an ancient riddle--and the courage to make the most difficult choice of her life. In this extraordinary quest, combining high adventure and heroic drama, a girl discovers that all living things are connected in ways she never expected, and that true friendship can reach across cultures, and even across centuries. |
tree symbolism in literature: When the Emperor Was Divine Julie Otsuka, 2007-12-18 From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines. |
tree symbolism in literature: Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees Ernst Lehner , Johanna Lehner , 2022-11-14 In Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees, Ernst and Johanna Lehner explore the rich cultural heritage and symbolic meanings associated with various flora across different societies and traditions. This comprehensive guide offers insights into how these natural elements have been woven into myths, legends, and everyday life, providing readers with a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness between nature and human culture. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Tree Pippa Salonius, Andrea Worm, 2014 With its vital character - growing, flowering, extending its roots into the ground, and its branches and leaves to the sky - the tree is a polyvalent metaphor, a suggestive symbol, and an allegorical subject. During the Middle Ages, a number of iconographic schemata were based on the image and structure of the tree, including the Tree of Jesse and the Tree of Virtues and Vices. From the late eleventh century onwards such formulae were increasingly used as devices for organizing knowledge and representing theoretical concepts. Despite the abstraction inherent in these schemata, however, the semantic qualities of trees persist in their usage. The analysis of different manifestations of trees in the Middle Ages is highly instructive for visual, intellectual, and cultural history. Essays in this volume concentrate on the formative period for arboreal imagery in the medieval West, that is, the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Using a range of methodological strategies and examining material from different media, ranging from illuminated manuscripts to wall painting, stained glass windows, and monumental sculpture, the articles in this volume show how different arboreal structures were conceived, employed, and appropriated by their specific contexts, how they functioned in their original framework, and how they were perceived by their audience. |
tree symbolism in literature: A Separate Peace John Knowles, 2022-05-24 PBS's The Great American Read named it one of America's best-loved novels. A Separate Peace has been a bestseller in the United States for nearly thirty years, and it is ageless in its depiction of youth during a time when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II. A Separate Peace is a horrific and brilliant fable about the dark side of adolescence set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II. Gene is an introverted, lonely intellectual. Phineas is a reckless athlete who is attractive and taunts others. Like the war itself, what happens between the two friends one summer robs these guys and their world of their innocence. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Social Life of Trees Laura Rival, 2021-03-10 The passionate response of the British public to the Newbury Bypass is a revealing measure of how strongly people feel about trees and the environment. Similarly, in the United States, the giant sequoia of California is an enduring national symbol that inspires intense feelings. As rainforests are sacrificed to the interests of multi-national corporations and traditional ways of life disappear, the status of forests, the cultural significance of trees, and the impact of conservation policies are subjects that have inspired intense engagement. Why do people feel so strongly about trees? With this explosion of interest in environmental issues, a serious study of what trees mean to people has long been overdue. This interdisciplinary book responds to this need by providing the first cross-cultural analysis of tree symbolism. Drawing on rich case studies, contributors explore the processes through which trees are used as metaphors of identity and continuity. Political struggles over forest resources feature prominently, and the perceptions of trees in various cultures provide telling insights into the ways in which human societies conceptualize nature.As well as being a major contribution to the field of symbolic anthropology, this comprehensive study will be essential reading for students in a wide range of courses and for anyone with a keen interest in the politics of ecology, the occult and neo-paganism, and the history and sociology of environmentalism in its widest sense. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver, 2008-10-04 Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees |
tree symbolism in literature: Plants and Literature Randy Laist, 2013-12-05 Myth, art, literature, film, and other discourses are replete with depictions of evil plants, salvific plants, and human-plant hybrids. In various ways, these representations intersect with “deep-rooted” insecurities about the place of human beings in the natural world, the relative viability of animalian motility and heterotrophy as evolutionary strategies, as well as the identity of organic life as such. Plants surprise us by combining the appearance of harmlessness and familiarity with an underlying strangeness. The otherness of vegetal life poses a challenge to our ethical, philosophical, and existential categories and tests the limits of human empathy and imagination. At the same time, the resilience of plants, their adaptability, and their integration with their habitat are a perennial source of inspiration and wisdom. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies examines the manner in which literary texts and other cultural products express our multifaceted relationship with the vegetable kingdom. The range of perspectives brought to bear on the subject of plant life by the various authors and critics represented in this volume comprise a novel vision of ecological interdependence and stimulate a revitalized sensitivity to the relationships we share with our photosynthetic brethren. Randy Laist is Associate Professor of English at Goodwin College. He is the author of Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels and the editor of Looking for Lost: Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series. He has also published dozens of articles on literature, film, and pedagogy. |
tree symbolism in literature: Walking with Trees Glennie Kindred, 2019-03 Walking with trees takes us on an intimate journey with 13 native trees of Britain and Europe. Glennie leads us into their world, describes their unique characteristics, natural history, healing properties, mythologies and crafts, and opens us to their subtle 'signatures'; what each tree can teach us when our hearts are open. This is a book about our relationships with trees, their relationships with each other and the natural world around them, and the deep interconnection between trees and the web of life on earth. It reveals a transformative pathway for individuals and provides an empowering practice for active engagement in the great challenges of our time.--COVER. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini, 2011-09-05 Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption. |
tree symbolism in literature: Letting Ana Go Anonymous, 2013-06-04 In the tradition of Go Ask Alice and Lucy in the Sky, a harrowing account of anorexia and addiction. She was a good girl from a good family, with everything she could want or need. But below the surface, she felt like she could never be good enough. Like she could never live up to the expectations that surrounded her. Like she couldn’t do anything to make a change. But there was one thing she could control completely: how much she ate. The less she ate, the better—stronger—she felt. But it’s a dangerous game, and there is such a thing as going too far… Her innermost thoughts and feelings are chronicled in the diary she left behind. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls, 2007-01-02 A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Red Tree Shaun Tan, 2010 A small child awakes to find blackened leaves falling from her bedroom ceiling, threatening to overwhelm her. 'Sometimes you wake up with nothing to look forward to...' As she wanders around a world that is complex, puzzling and alienating, she is overtaken by a myriad of feelings. Just as it seems all hope is lost, the girl returns to her bedroom to find that a tiny red seedling has grown to fill the room with warm light. Astonishing Australian artist, Shaun Tan's latest creation, The Red Tree, is a book about feelings - feelings that can not always be simply expressed in words. It is a series of imaginary landscapes conjured up by the wizardry of his masterful and miraculous art. As a kind of fable, The Red Tree seeks to remind us that, though some bad feelings are inevitable, they are always tempered by hope. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult and Its Mediterranean Relations Sir Arthur Evans, 1901 |
tree symbolism in literature: Walk Two Moons Sharon Creech, 2009-10-06 In her own singularly beautiful style, Newbery Medal winner Sharon Creech intricately weaves together two tales, one funny, one bittersweet, to create a heartwarming, compelling, and utterly moving story of love, loss, and the complexity of human emotion. Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle, proud of her country roots and the Indian-ness in her blood, travels from Ohio to Idaho with her eccentric grandparents. Along the way, she tells them of the story of Phoebe Winterbottom, who received mysterious messages, who met a potential lunatic, and whose mother disappeared. As Sal entertains her grandparents with Phoebe's outrageous story, her own story begins to unfold—the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose only wish is to be reunited with her missing mother. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Color of My Words Lynn Joseph, 2019-12-23 Américas Award Winner “An achingly beautiful story.”—Kirkus (starred review) “Eloquent.”—Booklist (starred review) “Lovely and lyrical.”—School Library Journal This powerful and resonant Américas Award-winning novel tells the story of a young girl’s struggle to find her place in the world and to become a writer in a country where words are feared. Seamlessly interweaving both poetry and prose, Lynn Joseph’s acclaimed debut is a lush and lyrical journey into a landscape and culture of the Dominican Republic. The Color of My Words explores the pain and poetry of discovering what it means to be part of a family, what it takes to find your voice and the means for it to be heard, and how it feels to write it all down. |
tree symbolism in literature: Far From the Tree Andrew Solomon, 2012 Solomon tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Overstory: A Novel Richard Powers, 2018-04-03 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period. —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Vegetarian Han Kang, 2016-02-02 FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.”—Entertainment Weekly One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year) “Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff “Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington Post Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly |
tree symbolism in literature: The Book Thief Markus Zusak, 2013-10-15 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME • A NEW YORK TIMES READER TOP 100 PICK FOR BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF. |
tree symbolism in literature: Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston, 1937 |
tree symbolism in literature: Birth of the Symbol Peter Struck, 2009-02-09 Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic symbol. The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative, he writes, with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages. Birth of the Symbol offers a new understanding of the role of poetry in the life of ideas in ancient Greece. Moreover, it demonstrates a connection between the way we understand poetry and the way it was understood by important thinkers in ancient times. |
tree symbolism in literature: All My Sons Arthur Miller, 1974 THE STORY: During the war Joe Keller and Steve Deever ran a machine shop which made airplane parts. Deever was sent to prison because the firm turned out defective parts, causing the deaths of many men. Keller went free and made a lot of money. The |
tree symbolism in literature: Trees As Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages Michael Bintley, Pippa Salonius, 2024-03-26 Forests, with their interlacing networks of trees and secret patterns of communication, are powerful entities for thinking-with. A majestic terrestrial community of arboreal others, their presence echoes, entangles, and resonates deeply with the human world. The essays collected here aim to highlight human encounters with the forest and its trees at the time of the European Middle Ages, when, whether symbol and metaphor, or actual and real, their lofty boughs were weighted with meaning. The chapters interrogate the pre-Anthropocene environment, reflecting on trees as metaphors for kinship and knowledge as they appear in literary, historical, art-historical, and philosophical sources. They examine images of trees and trees in-themselves across a range of environmental, material, and intellectual contexts, and consider how humans used arboreal and rhizomatic forms to negotiate bodies of knowledge and processes of transition. Looking beyond medieval Europe, they include discussion of parallel developments in the Islamic world and that of the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. |
tree symbolism in literature: The House on Mango Street Sandra Cisneros, 2013-04-30 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Tree of Red Stars Tessa Bridal, 1997 Magda, a young woman of privilege, is drawn into unexpected danger when she joins the underground struggle against the government of Uruguay. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Waiting Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, 2021-11-02 Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was an adult when her mother revealed a family secret: she was separated from her sister during the Korean War. It’s not an uncommon story—the peninsula was split down the 38th parallel, dividing one country into two. As many fled violence in the north, not everyone was able to make it south. Her mother’s story inspired Gendry-Kim to begin interviewing her and other Koreans separated by the war; that research fueled a deeply resonant graphic novel. The Waiting is the fictional story of Gwija, told by her novelist daughter Jina. When Gwija was 17 years old, after hearing that the Japanese were seizing unmarried girls, her family married her in a hurry to a man she didn't know. Japan fell, Korea gained its independence, and the couple started a family. But peace didn’t come. The young family—now four—fled south. On the road, while breastfeeding and changing her daughter, Gwija was separated from her husband and son. Then 70 years passed. Seventy years of waiting. Gwija is now an elderly woman and Jina can’t stop thinking about the promise she made to help find her brother. Expertly translated from Korean by award-winning Janet Hong, The Waiting is the devastating followup to Gendry-Kim’s Grass, which won the Krause Essay Prize, the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Harvey Award, and appeared on best of the year lists from the New York Times, The Guardian, Library Journal, and more. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Survivor Tree Gaye Sanders, 2017 A family plants an American elm on the Great Plains of Oklahoma just as the capital city is taking root -- the little tree grows as Oklahoma City grows until 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, the day America fell silent at the hands of one of its own. With her branches torn and tattered and filled with evidence from the bombing, the charred elm faces calls from some that she be cut down. In the end, as the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Building is cleared, this solitary tree remains -- but only because of a few who marvel that, like them, she is still there. The next spring when the first buds appear proving the tree is alive, the word spreads like a prairie wildfire through the city and the world. And the tree, now a beacon of hope and strength, is christened with a new name: The Survivor Tree. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Long, Long Life of Trees Fiona J. Stafford, Fiona Stafford, 2016-01-01 Fiona Stafford offers intimate, detailed explorations of seventeen common trees, from ash and apple to pine, oak, cypress, and willow. Stafford discusses practical uses of wood past and present, tree diseases and environmental threats, and trees' potential contributions toward slowing global climate change |
tree symbolism in literature: One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez, 2022-10-11 Netflix’s series adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres December 11, 2024! One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race. |
tree symbolism in literature: Arboreal Symbolism in European Art, 1300–1800 Katherine T. Brown, 2024-07-30 Arboreal Symbolism in European Art, 1300–1800 probes the significance of trees in religious iconography of Western art. Based in the disciplines of art history, botany, and theology, this study focuses on selected works of art in which tree forms embody and reflect Christian themes. Through this triple lens, Brown examines trees that early modern artists rendered as sacred symbols—symbols with origins in the Old Testament, New Testament, Greek and Roman cultures, and early medieval legends. Tree components and wood depicted in works of art can serve as evidence for early modern artists’ embrace of biblical metaphor, classical sources, and devotional connotations. The author considers how artists rendered seasonal change in Christian narratives to emphasize themes of spiritual transformation. Brown argues that many artists and their patrons drew parallels between the life cycle of a tree and events in the Gospels with their respective annual, liturgical celebrations. This book will interest scholars in art history, religion, humanities, and interdisciplinary studies. |
tree symbolism in literature: Myths of the Sacred Tree Moyra Caldecott, 1993-09-01 Essential to life on earth since the beginning of time, trees hold a special place in our collective consciousness: rooted in the earth, reaching skyward, nourished by the elements, and enlivened by the sap running through their veins, they provide a metaphor for what it means to be human. Moyra Caldecott has gathered here a collection of myths celebrating the rich symbolism of trees, all bringing to life a time when the natural world was deeply respected and trees and forests were thought to be inhabited by spirits and divine beings. Bound by the organized structure of modern life, the human spirit yearns for the wildness and freedom of primal nature represented by forests in their natural state. Caldecott's book has captured and given voice to this spirit. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Meaning of Trees Fred Hageneder, 2005-09 Presents full-color illustrated photographs that describes the botany, history, mythology, and folklore of some of the world's most unique trees including California's giant redwood. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver, 2009-10-13 New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility. |
tree symbolism in literature: Trees and Kings William R. Osborne, 2018 The Old Testament prophets did not hesitate to use the rhetorical conventions accessible to them when delivering their sermons of salvation and judgment. One source of comparison used frequently in the prophets and widely throughout the ancient Near East is the image of a tree. In Trees and Kings, William Osborne evaluates the cultural and cognitive setting that potentially gave rise to this figurative tree imagery, drawing on both comparative study with ancient Near Eastern tree imagery and the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor theory. Osborne examines tree metaphors that appear in the texts of Israel's writing prophets, specifically Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. He takes this material as largely reflective of the Israelite prophetic tradition from the 8th-6th centuries BC. Tree imagery in the Old Testament is certainly not limited to these prophetic books, and this study takes many of these texts into consideration in seeking to understand tree imagery in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel better. The question is rarely asked, why do the prophets often defer to the metaphorical use of the tree? The goal of this study is to answer this important question by comparing and contrasting tree metaphors in much of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament with tree imagery and metaphors encountered from the ancient Near East. |
tree symbolism in literature: The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages Anna Balakian, Anna Elizabeth Balakian, 1984 Edited by Anna Balakian, this volume marks the first attempt to discuss Symbolism in a full range of the literatures written in the European languages. The scope of these analyses, which explore Latin America, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as well as West European literatures, continues to make the volume a valuable reference today. As René Wellek suggests in his historiographic contribution, the fifty-one contributors not only make us think afresh about individual authors who are giants, but also draw us to reassess schools and movements in their local as well as international contexts. Reviewers comment that this copious and intelligently structured anthology, divided into eight parts, traces the conceptual bases and emergence of an international Symbolist movement, showing the spread of Symbolism to other national literatures from French sources, as well as the symbiotic transformations of Symbolism through appropriation and amalgamation with local literary trends. Several chapters deal with the relationships between literature and the other arts, pointing to Symbolism at work in painting, music, and theatre. Other chapters on the psychological aspects of the Symbolist method connect in interesting ways to a vision of metaphor and myth as virtually musical notation and an experimental emphasis on the play afforded by gaps between words. The volume is a major contribution to the most significant exponents and essential themes of Symbolism. The theoretical, historical, and typological sections of the volume help explain why the impact of this important movement of the fin-de-siècle is still felt today. |
tree symbolism in literature: Pine Trees in Korea Jae-sik Suh, 2017-10-31 Lush pine forests can be found throughout the Korean peninsula as the pine tree has successfully adapted to its natural environment over thousands of years. The evergreen pine forests have a different ambience and beauty from one region to another - from one season to the next - adding a unique charm to the landscape. Taking root on solid rocks and staying green even through snowstorms, the pine tree not only symbolises Korea's natural landscape, but also the resilient spirit and character of the people who have maintained their national identity in the face of many adversities. |
Northern Tree Habitats - Geophysical Institute
May 22, 2025 · They examined the present range of lodgepole pine and decided that the tree could survive in interior Alaska if given a chance. Lodgepole pine grows from …
Cottonwood and Balsam Poplar | Geophysical Institute
May 22, 2025 · While poplar may grow to 100 feet high and two feet across, cottonwood can reach to 125 feet and be much larger in diameter. Cottonwoods three feet in diameter …
More on Why Tree Trunks Spiral - Geophysical Institute
May 22, 2025 · Prevailing winds, in most of the tree-growing northern hemisphere, are from the west. Combine these factors, and the westerly wind pushing on the thicker …
Tree Rings and History - Geophysical Institute
May 1, 2025 · A tree's age can be easily determined by counting its growth rings, as any Boy or Girl Scout knows. Annually, the tree adds new layers of wood which thicken during the …
Trees as Earthquake Fault Indicators - Geophysical Insti…
May 22, 2025 · Then using tree ring dating methods, it may be possible to date earthquakes occurring before historical records were kept. The ability to identify and date very large …
Northern Tree Habitats - Geophysical Institute
May 22, 2025 · They examined the present range of lodgepole pine and decided that the tree could survive …
Cottonwood and Balsam Poplar | Geophysical Institute
May 22, 2025 · While poplar may grow to 100 feet high and two feet across, cottonwood can reach to 125 feet …
More on Why Tree Trunks Spiral - Geophysical Institute
May 22, 2025 · Prevailing winds, in most of the tree-growing northern hemisphere, are from the west. …
Tree Rings and History - Geophysical Institute
May 1, 2025 · A tree's age can be easily determined by counting its growth rings, as any Boy or Girl Scout …
Trees as Earthquake Fault Indicators - Geophysical Insti…
May 22, 2025 · Then using tree ring dating methods, it may be possible to date earthquakes occurring before …