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This book traces the figure of the alchemist in Western literature from its first appearance in Dante down to the present. From the beginning alchemy has had two aspects: exoteric or operative (the transmutation of baser metals into gold) and esoteric or speculative (the spiritual transformation of the alchemist himself). From Dante to Ben Jonson, during the centuries when the belief in exoteric alchemy was still strong, writers in many literatures treated alchemists with ridicule. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, as that belief weakened, the figure of the alchemist disappeared, even though Protestant poets in England and Germany were still fond of alchemical images. But when eighteenth-century science undermined alchemy, the figure of the alchemist began to emerge again in literature—now as a humanitarian hero or as a spirit striving for sublimation. As scholarly interest in alchemy intensified, writers were attracted to the figure of the alchemist and his quest for power. The fin de siècle witnessed a further transformation as some poets saw in the alchemist a symbol for the poet and others a manifestation of religious spirit. During the interwar years many writers turned to the figure of the alchemist as a spiritual model or as a national figurehead. This tendency, theorized by C. G. Jung, inspired after World War II a popularization of the figure in the novel. In sum: the figure of the alchemist in literature provides a seismograph for major shifts in intellectual and cultural history.

This book examines the far-reaching legacy of one of the great myths of classical antiquity. According to Greek legend, Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the orders of Creon, King of Thebes. Creon sentenced Antigone to death, but, before the order could be executed, she committed suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon — between the state and the individual, between young and old, between men and women — has captured the Western imagination for more than 2,000 years. Antigone and Creon are as alive in the politics and poetics of our own day as they were in ancient Athens. Here, the book examines the treatment of the Antigone theme in Western art, literature and thought, leading us to look again at the unique influence Greek myths exercised on 20th-century culture.

John Aubrey (1626–1697), antiquary, natural philosopher, and virtuoso, is best remembered today for his Brief Lives, biographies of his contemporaries filled with luminous detail which have been mined for anecdotes by generations of scholars. However, Aubrey was much more than merely the hand behind an invaluable source of biographical material; he was also the author of thousands of pages of manuscript notebooks covering everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. This work studies these manuscripts in full for the first time and, in doing so, explores the intellectual history of Aubrey’s investigations into Britain’s past. As such, the present volume is both a major new study of an important early modern writer and a significant intervention in the developing historiography of antiquarianism. It discusses the key aspects of Aubrey’s work in a series of linked chapters on archaeology, architecture, biography, folklore, and philology, concluding with a revisionist interpretation of Aubrey’s antiquarian writings. While covering a wide variety of scholarly territory, it remains rooted in the common thread of Aubrey’s own intellectual development and the continual interaction between his texts as he studied, discovered, revised, and rewrote them across four decades. Its conclusions not only substantially reshape our understanding of Aubrey and his writings, but also provide new understandings of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.

The zombie is ubiquitous in popular culture: from comic books to video games, to internet applications and homemade films, zombies are all around us. Investigating the zombie from an interdisciplinary perspective, with an emphasis on deep analytical engagement with diverse kinds of texts, this book addresses some of the more unlikely venues where zombies are found while providing the reader with a classic overview of the zombie's folkloric and cinematic history. What has the zombie metaphor meant in the past? Why does it continue to be so prevalent in our culture? Where others have looked at the zombie as an allegory for humanity's inner machinations or claimed the zombie as capitalist critique, this book seeks to provide an archaeology of the zombie-tracing its lineage from Haiti, mapping its various cultural transformations, and suggesting the post-humanist direction in which the zombie is ultimately heading. Approaching the zombie from many different points of view, the chapters here look across history and across media. Though they represent various theoretical perspectives, the whole makes a cohesive argument: The zombie has not just evolved within narratives; it has evolved in a way that transforms narrative. This book announces a new post-zombie, even before the boundaries of this rich and mysterious myth have been completely charted.

Diagnosing Folklore aspires to provide an inclusive forum for an expansive conversation on the sensitive, raw, and powerful processes that shape and imbue meaning in the lives of individuals and communities beleaguered by stigmatization, conflicting public perceptions, and contextual constraints. This volume aims to showcase current ideas and debates, as well as promote the larger study of disability, health, and trauma within folkloristics, and helping bridge the gaps between the folklore discipline and disability studies.

The presentation of the magical and mantic in Celtic literature has persistently been dogged by misunderstanding and over-romanticised readings. Among the misconceptions about the ancient and medieval Celtic peoples, the notion of a specifically ‘Celtic’ astrology remains widespread in the popular mind. This study aims to counter such myth-making, and to demonstrate how a number Irish and Welsh literary writers in the medieval and Early Modern period conceived of portents in the heavens — comets, blood-coloured moons, darkened suns — and what they knew of the complex art of astrology. The book examines the dissemination of concepts of portents and the science of the stars on the Celtic fringe from a literary perspective. A central concern is to provide an examination of the classes of people represented as expert in the interpretation of celestial portents: the early Irish annal-writer, the literary druid, the seer, the mythical prophet Merlin, and the learned Welsh poet of the late Middle Ages and beyond.

Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies talks about things folklorists don’t usually talk about. It ponders the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they talk about folklore and how those expectations necessarily affect the folklore they are talking about. The book’s chapters are wide-ranging in subject and style, yet they all orbit the idea that much of folklore, both as a phenomenon and as a field, hinges upon tacit or absent assumptions about who we are and what it is that we do. The authors articulate theories and methodologies for making sense of these absences, and, in the process, they offer critical new insights into discussions of race, authenticity, community, folklore and literature, popular culture, and scholarly authority. Taken as a whole, the book represents a new and challenging way of looking into the ways that groups come together to make meaning. In addition to the main chapters, the book also includes eight “interstitials,” shorter chapters that consider understudied and under-appreciated aspects of folklore. These discussions, which range from a consideration of knitting in public to the ways that invisibility shapes an internet meme to Bob Dylan, are presented as questions more than answers, encouraging readers to think about what folklore and folklore studies might look like if practitioners only chose to look at the subject from a slightly different angle.

This book describes and analyses the enduring interest in the last of the race through investigation into different treatments by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. The analysis is influenced by both literary expressions and extensive reading of the historical accounts, diaries, and newspaper reports of individuals who have represented the last of their kind. Fictional and real-life accounts of last men and women were compared and found to be enlightening. The biography of Pu Yi or the history of St Kilda may also help explain novels, such as The Last Man by Mary Shelley, and provide insights into the psychology of the sole survivor and the social significance of the unique symbols. More insights into a literary figure, such as James Macpherson's Ossian (the last of Fingal's race), could be derived from the Reminiscences of Michael O'Guiheen (the last poet of the Great Blasket Island) more so than from a lot of academic woks. This literature presents an excellent example of the now unclear boundaries between fact and fiction, since the author's recollections of the Great Blasket Island community are interspersed with literary allusions to the Oisin of Irish legend. The growth of the last of the race is traced in this book from the Restoration period, when traditional Christian views of human destiny started to diminish, to the late 19th century, when new racial ending patterns had arisen following evolutionary and thermodynamic theories.

Old Norse Mythology treats the mythology of Scandinavia: the gods Þórr (Thor) with his hammer, the wily and duplicitous Óðinn (Odin), the sly Loki, and other mythological figures. They create the world, battle their enemies, and die at the end of the world, which arises anew with a new generation of gods. These stories were the mythology of the Vikings, but they were not written down until long after the conversion to Christianity, mostly in Iceland. The mythology of the Vikings was an oral mythology, without canonical or even fixed texts. Following contemporary research trends, this book recognizes that variation in time and space are to be expected, and it notes rather than tries to resolve inconsistencies. In addition to a broad overview of Nordic myths, the book presents a case study of one myth, which tells of how Þórr (Thor) fished up the World Serpent analysing the myth as a sacred text of the Vikings. Old Norse mythology also explores the debt we owe to medieval intellectuals, who were able to incorporate the old myths into new paradigms that helped the myths to survive when they were no longer part of a religious system, and it traces the use of the mythology in ideological contexts, from the Viking Age until the twenty-first century.

This book suggests that the Old English poem Beowulf was composed between the reigns of Kings Beornwulf (823-6) and Wiglaf (827-9 and 830-39) of Mercia, in the winter of 826-7, in the monastery of Breedon on the Hill in NW Leicestershire, by Abbot Eanmund (ruled 814x816-c.848). The premise seems clear enough in the Beowulf–Wiglaf sequence in the last fifth of Beowulf. With Old Norse analogues, Beowulf's kinship with Hygelac, friendship with Hrothgar, interest in Freawaru, later role as king and kinship with ‘Wiglaf’ are all argued to be the poet's invention, one fashioned partly on the model of Vergil's Aeneid, while the sequence of big names in the Geatish part of Beowulf, Offa of Angeln – Hygelac – Beowulf – Wiglaf, is taken to be a reference to leaders of Mercia: Offa – Cenwulf – Beornwulf – Wiglaf. Three tales from Viking mythology are presented as sources for morally defining moments in the poem. Beowulf's death and Wiglaf's uncrowned status at the end are used to date Beowulf to between 826, when Beornwulf died in battle, and 827, when the historical Wiglaf took over from an intermediary named Ludeca. It is concluded that Beowulf was Wiglaf's propaganda for succession, a requiem for Beornwulf from the man who wished to rule after him; that Wiglaf cast himself as his own ancestor; and that, in the words Eanmundes laf (‘Eanmund's legacy’, line 2611), nine lines after introducing Wiglaf (line 2602, head of Fitt XXXVI), the poet leaves us his signature.

In Private Lives/Public Deaths, Jonathan Strauss shows how Sophocles's tragedy Antigone crystalized the political, intellectual, and aesthetic forces of an entire historical moment – fifth-century Athens – into one idea: the value of a single, living person. That idea existed, however, only as a powerful but unconcious desire. Drawing on classical studies, Hegel, and contemporary philosophical interpretations of this pivotal drama, Strauss argues that Antigone's tragedy, and perhaps all classical tragedy, represents the failure to satisfy this desire. To the extent that the value of a living individual remains an open question, what Sophocles attempted to imagine still escapes our understanding. Antigone is, in this sense, a text not from the past, but from our future.

This book looks at Irish Gothic and horror texts, in both English and Irish, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, examining how this kind of fiction represented the cultural and political concerns of the day through the deployment of monsters, both as characters and as representative figures. Monsters disrupt both our definition of ‘history’ (as a record of past events arranged into a narrative structure) and our scientific, political, or ‘common sense’ understanding of what is possible or impossible; the monster exists outside any notion of a universal morality (or even moral relativism), and with its strange biology it complicates ideologies of gender and race. To be confronted by a monster is to witness the breakdown accepted models of reality, and plunges the subject into a nihilistic world where human action is meaningless. Since Irish history is often conceived of as a sequence of ‘ruptures’ (e.g. the Plantations, the 1641 Rebellion, the Great Famine, the Anglo-Irish War and the Troubles), monstrosity is an apt lens through which to scrutinise Irish culture. Each chapter of this book looks at a different category of monster in turn, and looks at the distinctive ways in which they rupture human history.

The book is about factual and fictional pirates and is therefore a deliberate combination of history and literary history. Swashbuckling eighteenth-century pirates were the ideal pirates of all time and are still popular today. Most people have heard of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, for example, although they lived about three hundred years ago. But most people have also heard of other pirates, such as Long John Silver and Captain Hook, although those pirates never lived at all, except in literature. So there have been two kinds of pirates—real and imaginary—but the real, historical pirates are themselves somewhat legendary, somewhat fictional, belonging on the page and the stage rather than on the high seas. The book discriminates and describes the ascertainable facts of real eighteenth-century pirate lives and then investigates how such facts were subsequently transformed artistically, by British and American writers like Defoe, Poe and Stevenson, into realistic and fantastic fictions of various kinds: historical novels, popular melodramas, boyish adventures, Hollywood films. The aim is to watch, in other words, the long dissolve from Captain Kidd to Johnny Depp.