Shirley Moody-Turner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038853
- eISBN:
- 9781621039785
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038853.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton ...
More
Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton folklorists worked within, but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions, often calling into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. This book brings together these folklorists, along with a disparate group of African American authors and scholars, including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Anna Julia Cooper, to explore how black authors and folklorists were active participants--rather than passive observers--in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battle ground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import, namely, what role have representations of black folklore played in constructing notions of racial identity that remain entrenched up to and through present day, and how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage with black cultural traditions. This study offers a new context for re-thinking the relationship between African American Literature, African American folklore, race, and the politics of representation.Less
Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton folklorists worked within, but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions, often calling into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. This book brings together these folklorists, along with a disparate group of African American authors and scholars, including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Anna Julia Cooper, to explore how black authors and folklorists were active participants--rather than passive observers--in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battle ground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import, namely, what role have representations of black folklore played in constructing notions of racial identity that remain entrenched up to and through present day, and how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage with black cultural traditions. This study offers a new context for re-thinking the relationship between African American Literature, African American folklore, race, and the politics of representation.
Casie E. Hermansson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604732306
- eISBN:
- 9781604733532
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604732306.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial ...
More
Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. Astonishingly, this fairy tale was a nursery room staple, one of the tales translated into English from Charles Perrault’s French Mother Goose Tales. This book is a major study of the tale and its many variants (some, like “Mr. Fox,” native to England and America) in English: from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks, children’s toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, through the twentieth century in music, literature, art, film, and theater. Chronicling the story’s permutations, it presents examples of English true-crime figures, male and female, called Bluebeard, from King Henry VIII to present-day examples. The book explores rare chapbooks and their illustrations, and the English transformation of Bluebeard into a scimitar-wielding Turkish tyrant in a massively influential melodramatic spectacle in 1798. Following the killer’s trail over the years, the author looks at the impact of nineteenth-century translations into English of the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the particularly English story of how Bluebeard came to be known as a pirate. The book will provide readers and scholars with an invaluable and thorough grasp on the many strands of this tale over centuries of telling.Less
Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. Astonishingly, this fairy tale was a nursery room staple, one of the tales translated into English from Charles Perrault’s French Mother Goose Tales. This book is a major study of the tale and its many variants (some, like “Mr. Fox,” native to England and America) in English: from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks, children’s toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, through the twentieth century in music, literature, art, film, and theater. Chronicling the story’s permutations, it presents examples of English true-crime figures, male and female, called Bluebeard, from King Henry VIII to present-day examples. The book explores rare chapbooks and their illustrations, and the English transformation of Bluebeard into a scimitar-wielding Turkish tyrant in a massively influential melodramatic spectacle in 1798. Following the killer’s trail over the years, the author looks at the impact of nineteenth-century translations into English of the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the particularly English story of how Bluebeard came to be known as a pirate. The book will provide readers and scholars with an invaluable and thorough grasp on the many strands of this tale over centuries of telling.
Simon J. Bronner
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036163
- eISBN:
- 9781621036173
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036163.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and pranks. This book ...
More
From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and pranks. This book takes a long look at American campus life and how it is shaped by students and at the same time shapes the values of all who pass through it. The archetypes of absent-minded profs, fumbling jocks, and curve-setting dweebs are the stuff of legend and humor, along with the all-nighters, tailgating parties, and initiations that mark campus tradition—and student identities. The book traces historical changes in the distinctive traditions embraced by undergraduates. The predominant context has shifted from what it calls the “old-time college,” small in size and strong in its sense of community, to mass society’s “mega-university,” a behemoth that extends beyond any campus to multiple branches and offshoots throughout a state, region, and sometimes the globe. One might assume that the mega-university has dissolved collegiate traditions and displaced the old-time college, but the book finds the opposite. Student needs for social belonging in large universities and a fear of losing personal control have given rise to distinctive forms of lore and a striving for retaining the pastoral “campus feel” of the old-time college. The folkloric material students spout, and sprout, in response to these needs is varied.Less
From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and pranks. This book takes a long look at American campus life and how it is shaped by students and at the same time shapes the values of all who pass through it. The archetypes of absent-minded profs, fumbling jocks, and curve-setting dweebs are the stuff of legend and humor, along with the all-nighters, tailgating parties, and initiations that mark campus tradition—and student identities. The book traces historical changes in the distinctive traditions embraced by undergraduates. The predominant context has shifted from what it calls the “old-time college,” small in size and strong in its sense of community, to mass society’s “mega-university,” a behemoth that extends beyond any campus to multiple branches and offshoots throughout a state, region, and sometimes the globe. One might assume that the mega-university has dissolved collegiate traditions and displaced the old-time college, but the book finds the opposite. Student needs for social belonging in large universities and a fear of losing personal control have given rise to distinctive forms of lore and a striving for retaining the pastoral “campus feel” of the old-time college. The folkloric material students spout, and sprout, in response to these needs is varied.
Tina Bucuvalas (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617031403
- eISBN:
- 9781617031427
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617031403.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Florida is blessed with a semitropical climate, beautiful inland areas, and over a thousand miles of warm seas and sandy beaches. And Floridians are every bit as colorful and diverse as the tropical ...
More
Florida is blessed with a semitropical climate, beautiful inland areas, and over a thousand miles of warm seas and sandy beaches. And Floridians are every bit as colorful and diverse as the tropical foliage. The interaction between Florida’s people and its environment has created distinctive mixes of traditional life unlike those anywhere else in America. Florida’s cultural foundation includes Seminoles, Anglo-Celtic Crackers, African Americans, transplanted northerners, and ethnic communities, as well as cultural syntheses developed from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in Key West, Tampa, St. Augustine, and Pensacola. In recent decades, the state’s population has been strongly impacted by large-scale immigration from Cuba, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. South Florida leads other regions in the development of a contemporary cultural synthesis, but Orlando and Tampa are rapidly evolving. Even sleepy north Florida is experiencing a significant shift. This book provides an overview of Florida folklife, bringing together chapters written by folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists on a wide array of topics. It examines topics as diverse as regional and ethnic folk groups, occupational folklife, the built environment, musical traditions, rituals, and celebrations.Less
Florida is blessed with a semitropical climate, beautiful inland areas, and over a thousand miles of warm seas and sandy beaches. And Floridians are every bit as colorful and diverse as the tropical foliage. The interaction between Florida’s people and its environment has created distinctive mixes of traditional life unlike those anywhere else in America. Florida’s cultural foundation includes Seminoles, Anglo-Celtic Crackers, African Americans, transplanted northerners, and ethnic communities, as well as cultural syntheses developed from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in Key West, Tampa, St. Augustine, and Pensacola. In recent decades, the state’s population has been strongly impacted by large-scale immigration from Cuba, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. South Florida leads other regions in the development of a contemporary cultural synthesis, but Orlando and Tampa are rapidly evolving. Even sleepy north Florida is experiencing a significant shift. This book provides an overview of Florida folklife, bringing together chapters written by folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists on a wide array of topics. It examines topics as diverse as regional and ethnic folk groups, occupational folklife, the built environment, musical traditions, rituals, and celebrations.
Frank de Caro
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037641
- eISBN:
- 9781617037658
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037641.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
This book starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers ...
More
This book starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity. The book discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore, but which does so in a manner that examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of “unorthodox” theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation for tourism promotion.Less
This book starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity. The book discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore, but which does so in a manner that examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of “unorthodox” theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation for tourism promotion.
Sadhana Naithani
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039935
- eISBN:
- 9781626740266
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039935.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Can the study of folklore survive brutal wars and nationalized misappropriations? Does folklore make sense in an age of fearsome technology? These are two of several questions this book addresses ...
More
Can the study of folklore survive brutal wars and nationalized misappropriations? Does folklore make sense in an age of fearsome technology? These are two of several questions this book addresses with specific and profound reference to the history of folklore studies in Germany. There in the early nineteenth century in the ideological context of romantic nationalism, the works of the Brothers Grimm pioneered the discipline. The sublimation of folklore studies with the nation’s political history reached a peak in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This book takes a full look at what happened to folklore after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis. A special focus on Lutz Röhrich (1923–2006), whose work spans the decades from 1955 to 2006, makes it a unique window into a monumental reclamation. In 1945 Röhrich returned from the warfront at the age of twenty-three, a wounded amputee. Resuming his education, he published his seminal Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Folktale and Reality) in 1956. The author argues that through this and a huge body of scholarship on folktale, folksong, proverbs, and riddles over the next decades, Röhrich transformed folklore scholarship by critically challenging the legacies of Romanticism and Nazism in German folklore work.Less
Can the study of folklore survive brutal wars and nationalized misappropriations? Does folklore make sense in an age of fearsome technology? These are two of several questions this book addresses with specific and profound reference to the history of folklore studies in Germany. There in the early nineteenth century in the ideological context of romantic nationalism, the works of the Brothers Grimm pioneered the discipline. The sublimation of folklore studies with the nation’s political history reached a peak in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This book takes a full look at what happened to folklore after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis. A special focus on Lutz Röhrich (1923–2006), whose work spans the decades from 1955 to 2006, makes it a unique window into a monumental reclamation. In 1945 Röhrich returned from the warfront at the age of twenty-three, a wounded amputee. Resuming his education, he published his seminal Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Folktale and Reality) in 1956. The author argues that through this and a huge body of scholarship on folktale, folksong, proverbs, and riddles over the next decades, Röhrich transformed folklore scholarship by critically challenging the legacies of Romanticism and Nazism in German folklore work.
Michael Kinsella
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739831
- eISBN:
- 9781604739848
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739831.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
On the Internet, seekers investigate anonymous manifestos that focus on the findings of brilliant scientists said to have discovered pathways into alternate realities. Gathering on web forums, ...
More
On the Internet, seekers investigate anonymous manifestos that focus on the findings of brilliant scientists said to have discovered pathways into alternate realities. Gathering on web forums, researchers not only share their observations, but also report having anomalous experiences, which they believe come from their online involvement with these veiled documents. Seeming logic combines with wild twists of lost Moorish science and pseudo-string theory. Enthusiasts insist that any obstacle to revelation is a sure sign of great and wide-reaching efforts by consensus powers wishing to suppress all the liberating truths in the Incunabula Papers (included here in complete form). This book explores these and other extraordinary pursuits. It is the first book dedicated to legend-tripping, ritual quests in which people strive to explore and find manifest the very events described by supernatural legends. Through collective performances, legend-trippers harness the interpretive frameworks these stories provide and often claim incredible, out-of-this-world experiences that in turn perpetuate supernatural legends. Legends and legend-tripping are assuming tremendous prominence in a world confronting new speeds of diversification, connection, and increasing cognitive load. As guardians of tradition as well as agents of change, legends and the ordeals they inspire contextualize ancient and emergent ideas, behaviors, and technologies that challenge familiar realities. This book analyzes supernatural legends and the ways in which the sharing spirit of the Internet collectivizes, codifies, and makes folklore of fantastic speculation.Less
On the Internet, seekers investigate anonymous manifestos that focus on the findings of brilliant scientists said to have discovered pathways into alternate realities. Gathering on web forums, researchers not only share their observations, but also report having anomalous experiences, which they believe come from their online involvement with these veiled documents. Seeming logic combines with wild twists of lost Moorish science and pseudo-string theory. Enthusiasts insist that any obstacle to revelation is a sure sign of great and wide-reaching efforts by consensus powers wishing to suppress all the liberating truths in the Incunabula Papers (included here in complete form). This book explores these and other extraordinary pursuits. It is the first book dedicated to legend-tripping, ritual quests in which people strive to explore and find manifest the very events described by supernatural legends. Through collective performances, legend-trippers harness the interpretive frameworks these stories provide and often claim incredible, out-of-this-world experiences that in turn perpetuate supernatural legends. Legends and legend-tripping are assuming tremendous prominence in a world confronting new speeds of diversification, connection, and increasing cognitive load. As guardians of tradition as well as agents of change, legends and the ordeals they inspire contextualize ancient and emergent ideas, behaviors, and technologies that challenge familiar realities. This book analyzes supernatural legends and the ways in which the sharing spirit of the Internet collectivizes, codifies, and makes folklore of fantastic speculation.
Jack V. Haney (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037306
- eISBN:
- 9781621039235
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037306.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
This book of folktales from the Far North of European Russia features seventeen works by five narrators of the Russian tale, all recorded in the twentieth century. The tales, distinguished by their ...
More
This book of folktales from the Far North of European Russia features seventeen works by five narrators of the Russian tale, all recorded in the twentieth century. The tales, distinguished by their extraordinary length and by the manner in which they were commonly told, appear to have flourished only in the twentieth century and only in Russian Karelia. Although they are easily recognized as wondertales, or fairy tales, their treatment of the traditional matter is anything but usual. In these tales, one encounters such topics as regicide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, premarital relations between the sexes and more, all related in the typical manner of the Russian folktale. The narrators were not educated beyond a rudimentary level. All were middle-aged or older, and all were men. Crew members of a fishing or hunting vessel plying the White Sea or lumberjacks or trappers in the vast northern forests, they frequently began the narration of a tale in an evening, then broke off at an appropriate moment and continued at a subsequent gathering. Such tales were thus told serially. Given their length, their thematic and narrative complexity, and their stylistic proficiency, one might even refer to them as orally delivered Russian short stories or novellas.Less
This book of folktales from the Far North of European Russia features seventeen works by five narrators of the Russian tale, all recorded in the twentieth century. The tales, distinguished by their extraordinary length and by the manner in which they were commonly told, appear to have flourished only in the twentieth century and only in Russian Karelia. Although they are easily recognized as wondertales, or fairy tales, their treatment of the traditional matter is anything but usual. In these tales, one encounters such topics as regicide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, premarital relations between the sexes and more, all related in the typical manner of the Russian folktale. The narrators were not educated beyond a rudimentary level. All were middle-aged or older, and all were men. Crew members of a fishing or hunting vessel plying the White Sea or lumberjacks or trappers in the vast northern forests, they frequently began the narration of a tale in an evening, then broke off at an appropriate moment and continued at a subsequent gathering. Such tales were thus told serially. Given their length, their thematic and narrative complexity, and their stylistic proficiency, one might even refer to them as orally delivered Russian short stories or novellas.
Russell Frank
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739282
- eISBN:
- 9781604739299
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739282.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Newslore is folklore that comments on and hinges on knowledge of current events. These expressions come in many forms: jokes, urban legends, digitally altered photographs, mock news stories, press ...
More
Newslore is folklore that comments on and hinges on knowledge of current events. These expressions come in many forms: jokes, urban legends, digitally altered photographs, mock news stories, press releases or interoffice memoranda, parodies of songs, poems, political and commercial advertisements, movie previews and posters, still or animated cartoons, and short live-action films. This book offers a snapshot of the items of newslore disseminated via the Internet that gained the widest currency around the turn of the millennium. Among the newsmakers lampooned in e-mails and on the Web were Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, and such media celebrities as Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. The book also looks at the folk response to the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. The book analyzes this material by tracing each item back to the news story it refers to in search of clues as to what, exactly, the item reveals about the public’s response. The book’s argument throughout is that newslore is an extremely useful and revelatory gauge for public reaction to current events, and an invaluable screen capture of the latest zeitgeist.Less
Newslore is folklore that comments on and hinges on knowledge of current events. These expressions come in many forms: jokes, urban legends, digitally altered photographs, mock news stories, press releases or interoffice memoranda, parodies of songs, poems, political and commercial advertisements, movie previews and posters, still or animated cartoons, and short live-action films. This book offers a snapshot of the items of newslore disseminated via the Internet that gained the widest currency around the turn of the millennium. Among the newsmakers lampooned in e-mails and on the Web were Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, and such media celebrities as Princess Diana and Michael Jackson. The book also looks at the folk response to the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. The book analyzes this material by tracing each item back to the news story it refers to in search of clues as to what, exactly, the item reveals about the public’s response. The book’s argument throughout is that newslore is an extremely useful and revelatory gauge for public reaction to current events, and an invaluable screen capture of the latest zeitgeist.
Aisling Byrne
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198746003
- eISBN:
- 9780191808708
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746003.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, Folk Literature
Otherworlds are a recurrent feature in medieval literary texts and are usually characterized by a set of distinctive features. This study highlights the potentially anachronistic implications of ...
More
Otherworlds are a recurrent feature in medieval literary texts and are usually characterized by a set of distinctive features. This study highlights the potentially anachronistic implications of using the term ‘otherworld’ in a medieval context, noting the absence of any analogous lexical item in the languages of medieval Britain and Ireland. It argues that medieval otherworlds are not defined primarily on semantic or ontological grounds, but by a rich lexicon of distinctive motifs which came to be associated with supernatural realms. The intensity and creativity with which otherworlds were imagined in medieval narratives made them particularly ripe for exploitation by the authors of more historically minded works. The structure of the book reflects this emphasis: it takes the literary properties of these depictions as its starting point and moves from these to the historical applications of such fictional descriptions. In doing so, it inverts a traditional view of medieval literary otherworlds which sees them as passive reflections of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs. Accounts of fantastical realms are often used to very serious purpose by medieval authors. They overlap in striking ways with afterlife depictions; they often comment on political realities in the historical world; sometimes they even reimagine real-world locations, like the islands of Britain and Ireland, as otherworlds.Less
Otherworlds are a recurrent feature in medieval literary texts and are usually characterized by a set of distinctive features. This study highlights the potentially anachronistic implications of using the term ‘otherworld’ in a medieval context, noting the absence of any analogous lexical item in the languages of medieval Britain and Ireland. It argues that medieval otherworlds are not defined primarily on semantic or ontological grounds, but by a rich lexicon of distinctive motifs which came to be associated with supernatural realms. The intensity and creativity with which otherworlds were imagined in medieval narratives made them particularly ripe for exploitation by the authors of more historically minded works. The structure of the book reflects this emphasis: it takes the literary properties of these depictions as its starting point and moves from these to the historical applications of such fictional descriptions. In doing so, it inverts a traditional view of medieval literary otherworlds which sees them as passive reflections of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs. Accounts of fantastical realms are often used to very serious purpose by medieval authors. They overlap in striking ways with afterlife depictions; they often comment on political realities in the historical world; sometimes they even reimagine real-world locations, like the islands of Britain and Ireland, as otherworlds.
Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing
Clausewitz's Puzzle
International Legitimacy and World Society
Multicultural Nationalism
Levelling the Playing Field
The Politics of Public Service Bargains
Free Will and Modern Science
Corporate Governance, Competition, and Political Parties
New Labour at the Centre
