The dialectic of light and darkness studied in this collection of essays reveals itself as a primal factor of life as well as the essential element of the specifically human world. From its borderline position between physis and psyche, natural growth and techne, bios and ethos, it functions as the essential factor in all the sectors of life at large. We see its crucial role in all sectors of life while, prompted by man's creative imagination, it enhances and spurs his vital as well as societal and spiritual life.
This rare collection contains studies by Thomas Ryba, Krystina Górniak-Kocikowska, Lois Oppenheim, Sydney Feshback, Eldon van Lieve, Sitansu Ray, Theodore Litman, Peter Morgan, Colette Michael, Christopher Lalonde, L. Findlay, Christopher Eykman, Beverly Schlack Randles, Jorge García-Gómez, William Haney, Sherilyn Abdoo, David Brottman, Alan Pratt, Hans Rudnick, George Scheper, Freema Gottlieb, Marlies Kronegger.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
Elemental Forms, Creativity and the Trans-formative Power of Literature in A-T. Tymieniecka's Tractatus Brevis.- The Light, the Word, the Sea, and the Inner Moral Self.- No Matter How No Matter Where: The Unlit in Samuel Beckett's Not I and Stirrings Still.- The Light at the End of the Tunnel Is Coming Right at Me, or, the Dialectic of Elemental Light and Elemental Dark.- Monet's Revealing Light: Evolution and Devolution.- Tagore on the Dialectics of Light and Darkness.- The Sublime as a Source of Light in the Works of Nicolas Boileau.- Light in Wordsworth Illustrated.- Light/Darkness and the Phenomenon of Creation in Victor Hugo.- Illuminating Light inAugust.- Imagining Epistemology: Plato and Romantic Luminaries.- The Symbolic Meaning of Light in Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild.- Virginia Woolf's Poetic Imagination: Patterns of Light and Darkness in To the Lighthouse.- The Swan and Erotic Love: Light, Color, and Myth in Rubén Dariío's Poetics.- Metaphor and the Experience of Light.- Jake Barnes' Insomnia and Fiesta Nightmare in The Sun Also Rises.- Light-Values as Existential Indices in Thomas Pynchon's Extravagant Comic Revery.- A Note on Heidegger's Death Analytic: The Tolstoyian Correlative.- Per aspera ad astra: Aspects of Darkness and Light in Western Literary Consciousness.- Illumination and Darkness in the Song of Songs.- Light and the Aesthetics of Holiness in the Jewish Spiritual Tradition.- Reason and Laughter: Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher and La Danse des Morts.- Creative Imagination and Dream.- Index of Names.