The Grandmother of Time by Zsuzsanna Budapest

The Grandmother of Time by Zsuzsanna Budapest

The Romantic age, though often associated with free erotic expression, was ambivalent about what if anything sex had to do with the public sphere. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British texts often repressed the very sexual energies they claimed to be bringing into the open. The delineation of what could and could not be said and done in the name of physical pleasure was of a piece with the capitalist consecration of the social trust to the individual profit-motive. Both these practices, moreover, presupposed a determinate self with sovereignty over its own interests. Writings from and about some nominally public institutions were thus characterized by privatism--a sexual, economic and ontological withdrawal from otherness.　

Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One explores how this threefold ideology was both propagated and resisted, wittingly and unwittingly, successfully and unsuccessfully, in such Romantic publics as rape-law, sodomy-law, adultery-law, high-profile scandals, the population debates, and club-culture. It includes readings of imaginative literature by William Beckford, William Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Hays, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of political economy by Jeremy Bentham, William Cobbett, William Godwin, William Hazlitt and Thomas Robert Malthus; as well as contemporary legal treatises, popular journalism and satirical pamphlets.

Budapest, Zsuzsanna E.: - I was born in Budapest on January 30, 1940, on a terrible north-wind-whipped morning. My mother, Masika, then only twenty-five years old, had great trouble delivering me, so I was born by cesarean section. Mother was a famous sculptor who also happened to be a psychic, medium, and palm reader. She came from a long line of witches in the herbalist tradition. Her sister continued the line, becoming a pharmacist.

The Hungarian revolution in 1956 changed my life. I escaped to the West and went to school in Innsbruck and Vienna, and later at the University of Chicago, studying languages. I married and had two sons.

I studied with Second City, then with Viola Spolin, the mother of improvisation, and later at American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York.

In 1970 I discovered the Women's Liberation Movement, which led to another huge change in my life: I became a conscious woman. Feminism gave me so much. I decided to contribute seriously by connecting witchcraft with feminism, thereby sparking the women's spirituality movement. I wrote the first feminist witchcraft book, The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows, which later became The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries; I followed this with two other books, Grandmother of Time and Grandmother Moon.

When I am not working on a new book I like to work with women at weekend workshops, retreats, and witch camps, where we practice the remembered arts of witchcraft in safe circles of women. We use tools of dance and chanting, candles, and incense to lift our spirits. We take part in guided meditations and pay visits to our ancestors and the Wild Woman. We practice using aromas and Bach remedies for inner balance.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062501097
ISBN 10	0062501097
Title	The Grandmother of Time
Author	Zsuzsanna Budapest
Condition	Unavailable
Binding type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	1989-11-07
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable