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Melusine The Serpent Goddess In A S Byatts Possession And In Mythology
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Book Synopsis Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology by : Gillian M. E. Alban
Download or read book Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology written by Gillian M. E. Alban and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gillian Alban meticulously pursues the Fairy Melusine snake-woman image through the plot and the poetry of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession, into medieval legend, and beyond into her antecedents in ancient myth. The book describes the erotically inspiring force of Melusine's love story and draws parallels with goddesses such as Lamia, Ishtar or Inanna, Isis, and Asherah. Mother, creator, and leader, the figure of Melusine was ultimately vilified and tellingly converted into the demon of patriarchal accounts, as seen in the examples of Lilith, Medusa, Scylla, and the serpent in the Garden. Alban deconstructs part of Genesis, including the roles of Adam and Eve and Cain's crime, and illuminates the Old Testament worship of the goddess Asherah alongside the male Yahweh. A forceful exploration of literature, history, and myth, this study sweeps away limiting assumptions about the female sex. Melusine the Serpent Goddess restores the dignity acknowledged to women of old, making a forceful statement about the power and creativity of women.
Book Synopsis The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction by : Gillian M. E. Alban
Download or read book The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction written by Gillian M. E. Alban and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Medusa Gaze offers striking insights into the desires and frustrations of women through the narratives of the impressive contemporary novelists Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Rhys and Michèle Roberts. It illuminates women’s power and vulnerability as they construct their own egos in opposition to their hostile alter egos or others facing them in their mirrors, and fixes a panoptic gaze on the women stalking its pages, as they learn how to deflect the menacing gaze of others by returning their look defiantly back at them. Some stare back and win assurance; others are stared down, reduced to psychic trauma, madness and even suicide. The book shows how Freud’s, Sartre’s and Lacan’s androcentric views define the Medusa m/other as monstrous, and how the efforts of mothers to nurture may be slighted as inadequate or devouring. It presents Medusa and other goddess figures as inspirational, repelling harm through the ‘evil eye’ of their powerful gaze. Conversely, it also shows women who are condemned as monstrous Gorgons, trapped in enmity, rivalry and rage. Representing English, American and African American, Canadian and Caribbean writing, the works explored here include realistic, social narrative and magical realist writings, in addition to tales of the past and dystopian narratives.
Book Synopsis The Survival of Myth by : Paul Hardwick
Download or read book The Survival of Myth written by Paul Hardwick and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are myths and what are they for? Myths are stories that both tell us how to live and remind us of the inescapability and pull of the collective past. The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity explores the continuing power of primal stories to inhabit our thinking. An international range of contributors examine a range of texts and figures from the Bible to Cormac McCarthy and from Thor to the Virgin Mary to focus on the way that ancient stories both give access to the unconscious and offer individuals and communities personae or masks. Myths translated and recreated become, in this sense, very public acts about very private thoughts and feelings. The subtitle of the book, ‘Innovation, Singularity and Alterity,’ reflects the way in which the history of cultures in all genres is a history of innovation, of a search for new modes of expression which, paradoxically, often entails recourse to myth precisely because it offers narratives of singularity and otherness which may be readily appropriated. The individual contributors offer testament to the continuing significance of myth through its own constant metamorphosis, as it both reflects and transforms the societies in which it is (re)produced.
Book Synopsis The Book of Melusine of Lusignan in History, Legend and Romance by : Gareth Knight
Download or read book The Book of Melusine of Lusignan in History, Legend and Romance written by Gareth Knight and published by Skylight Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considerable interest in faery tradition has grown up in recent years and not least in the story of Melusine of Lusignan, the subject of a prose romance by Jean d'Arras at the end of the 14th century, swiftly followed by one in verse by Couldrette. This book provides a collection of material from various sources to give an all round picture of the remarkable faery, her town, her church, her immediate family, and the great Lusignan dynasty she founded. An established authority on Melusine, Gareth Knight collects together all the best source material, which he translates from the French, and presents his own researches into the Lusignan family of the 12th century, whose dynasty included kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, examining the possibility of a familiar spirit guiding the family in its destiny.
Download or read book Melusine's Footprint written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth offers nineteen new critical essays from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examining the cultural, literary, and mythical inheritance of the legendary half-fairy, half-serpent Melusine.
Book Synopsis Romancing the Goddess by : Marijane Osborn
Download or read book Romancing the Goddess written by Marijane Osborn and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take three exciting medieval romances, translate them - two for the first time - into modern English verse, and you'll have only part of Marijane Osborn's Romancing the Goddess. Osborn introduces and translates the three tales, all dealing with women cast adrift upon the northern and Mediterranean seas, then shows how the stories forge a hitherto missing link with worship of a savior goddess in the distant past.
Book Synopsis Generic Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel by : Madelena Gonzalez
Download or read book Generic Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel written by Madelena Gonzalez and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary aesthetics is characterized by generic mixing on the level of both form and content. The barriers between different media and different genres have been broken down in all literary art forms, whether it be theatre, poetry, or the novel. While the publishing industry is increasingly keen to label novels according to genre or sub-genre (“Chick Lit”, “Lad Lit”, “Gay fiction”, “Scottish fiction”, “New Historical Fiction”, “Crime fiction”, “Post-9/11 Fiction”), the novel itself (and novelists) persist in resisting generic categorizations as well as inviting them. Is this a move towards a new artistic liberty or does it simply testify to a confusion of identity? The “aesthetic supermarket” evoked by Lodge in 1992 does indeed seem to sum up the variety of choices open to writers of fiction today and a literary landscape characterized by crossover and hybridization. The familiar dialectic of realism versus experimentation has segued into a middle ground of consensus which is neither radical nor populist, but both at the same time. The techniques of postmodernism have become selling points for novels, and the Postmodern Condition itself seems little more than a narrative posture marketed for an increasingly wide audience. Whether they have recourse to a “repertoire of imposture” (Amis, Self, Winterson), as Richard Bradford would have it (The Novel Now, 2007), in other words “the abandonment of any obligation to explain or justify their excursions from credulity and mimesis”, or, like the New Puritans, make use of narrative minimalism in order to foreground their own peculiarities, contemporary novelists consistently draw attention to the fundamental instability of narrative process and genre. The much-feared apocalypse of the novel has failed to take place with the arrival of the new millennium, but generic game-playing and flickering, narrative hesitation and uncertainty continue to pose the question of what constitutes a novel today and to challenge its identity in a world where all culture is increasingly public, increasingly contested and increasingly multifarious. Thanks to theoretical approaches as well as analyses of specific works, this collection of essays aims to examine the concepts of generic instability and cross-fertilization, of narrative postures and impostures, and their constant redefinition of identity, which contaminates the very concept of genre. It demonstrates the diversity of generic practices in the novel today and furnishes us with undeniable evidence of how generic instability is fundamentally constitutive of the contemporary novel’s identity.
Book Synopsis The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing and Hygiene from Antiquity through the Renaissance by : Cynthia Kosso
Download or read book The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing and Hygiene from Antiquity through the Renaissance written by Cynthia Kosso and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining historical water use and ideology diachronically and cross regionally, this book reveals how religion, politics, science and social relationships transformed and were transformed by the manipulation of, uses of, and disputes over water in daily life, ceremonies, and literature.
Download or read book A.S. Byatt written by Alexa Alfer and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study of A. S. Byatt’s work spans virtually her entire career and offers insightful readings of all of Byatt’s works of fiction up to and including her Man-Booker-shortlisted novel The Children’s Book (2009). The authors combine an accessible overview of Byatt’s œuvre to date with close critical analysis of all her major works. Uniquely, the book also considers Byatt’s critical writings and journalism, situating her beyond the immediate context of her fiction. The authors argue that Byatt is not only important as a storyteller, but also as an eminent critic and public intellectual. Advancing the concept of ‘critical storytelling’ as a hallmark of Byatt’s project as a writer, the authors retrace Byatt’s wide-ranging engagement with both literary and critical traditions. This results in positioning Byatt in the wider literary landscape. This book has broad appeal, including fellow researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, plus general enthusiasts of Byatt’s work.
Book Synopsis A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women by : Leanne Bibby
Download or read book A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women written by Leanne Bibby and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt’s representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be inherently mythopoeic, or capable of restructuring the myth of the intellectual as male by default. This mythopoeia is, furthermore, intrinsically feminist in function, thus potentially broadening the conventional, limited view of women in intellectual history. The book will be the first study of Byatt’s work to examine this figure in detail, and the first study of women intellectuals in historical and literary discourse to apply concepts of mythopoeia and sexual difference in ways that allow new readings of women’s status and work in public spheres.
Book Synopsis Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt by : Alexandra Cheira
Download or read book Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt written by Alexandra Cheira and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-19 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides sustained critical attention on Byatt’s wonder tales, both the stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, it examines Byatt’s claim that her wonder tales “are modern literary stories and they do play quite consciously with a postmodern creation and recreation of old forms” through a revisitation of the wonder tale in a productive dialogue with tradition as an expanded recognition of this fertile creative-critical dialogue with regards to the significance of the wonder tale in Byatt’s fictional work. The book evinces a fresh variety of conceptions and approaches to Byatt’s wonder tales, some spanning several tales and others focussing on a specific wonder tale, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story or novel and genre or tale, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches.
Book Synopsis Contemporary British Fiction by : Nick Bentley
Download or read book Contemporary British Fiction written by Nick Bentley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from 1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism, gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture.A comprehensive Introduction provides a historical context for the study of contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural events. This is followed by five chapters organised around the core themes: (1) Narrative Forms, (2) Contemporary Ethnicities, (3) Gender and Sexuality, (4) History, Memory and Writing, and (5) Narratives of Cultural Space.
Download or read book Snake written by Drake Stutesman and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A snake smells with its tongue, hears with its flesh, and breathes under the sand with one lung; it can copulate for days with one snake or with fifty at once; it has infrared radar; and it can induce spontaneous bleeding if threatened. With all these qualities, it is easy to see how snakes have such varied associations in cultures around the world: while celebrated in tattoos and tales, and for medicinal benefits, snakes are also so universally feared that they constantly endure intense persecution and rarely enjoy protected rights. Drake Stutesman explores here in Snake the fascinating natural history of the maligned serpentine. Stutesman examines a wide range of sources to investigate the complex and widespread symbolism the snake has inspired, including the serpent's temptation of Eve in the Bible, Kaa in The Jungle Book, the Chinese zodiac, Indian snake charmers, and the Hollywood film Anaconda. She looks at the role snakes have played in human culture and science, from snake cuisine and the use of venom in medicine to the intriguing history of snake symbolism in art, architecture, cinema, and even clothing. Richly illustrated and written in an engaging style, Snake is an invaluable resource for snake enthusiasts and scholars, as well as for all who love, admire, or fear this fascinating and enduring animal.
Book Synopsis Goddesses in World Culture by : Patricia Monaghan
Download or read book Goddesses in World Culture written by Patricia Monaghan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 973 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of accessible essays relates the stories of individual goddesses from around the world, exploring their roles in the cultures from which they came, their histories and status today, and the controversies surrounding them. Goddesses in World Culture brings readers the fascinating stories of close to 100 of the world's goddesses, ranging from the immediately recognizable to the obscure. These figures, many of whom derive from ancient cultures and civilizations, serve as points of departure for examining questions that go well beyond the role of women in religion and spirituality to include social organization, environmental awareness, historical developments, and psychological archetypes. Each volume of this groundbreaking set is composed of 20–25 previously unpublished articles written by expert contributors from diverse disciplines. Volume one covers Asia and Africa, volume two covers the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, and volume three covers Australia and the Americas. Goddesses from cultures often overlooked in texts on religion, such as those of the Australian Aborigines, Korea, Nepal, and the Caribbean, are included here. In addition, the work offers new translations of ancient texts, introduces little-known folklore, and suggests new approaches to contemporary religious practices.
Book Synopsis Iris Murdoch and Her Work by : Mustafa Kirca
Download or read book Iris Murdoch and Her Work written by Mustafa Kirca and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores different aspects of Murdoch's work including her philosophy and fiction, focusing on a wide variety of issues ranging from reading "Murdoch as a fabulator" to the central role Murdoch plays in the "ethical turn." Approaching Murdoch's work from multiple perspectives, this book is of interest for Murdoch scholars, literature and philosophy students, as well as for general readers.
Download or read book Bird Magic written by Sandra Kynes and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connect to the Great Goddess through the Magic of Birds Birds have been symbolic of the Great Goddess for millennia, representing her power and connection to the mysteries of life, death, and spirit. Bird Magic teaches you how to commune with the Goddess, incorporating her into your magical life through exercises, crafts, meditations, and more. Working with bird magic helps awaken your intuition, tap into subtle energies around you, and strengthen your bond with the natural world. Providing an encyclopedic listing of more than sixty bird species—highlighting each one's history, folklore, location, appearance, and magical wisdom—Bird Magic shows how they can enhance your spiritual and personal life. With in-depth information, helpful illustrations, and hands-on guidance, this book will be your go-to reference for years to come.
Book Synopsis Apuleius in European Literature by : Stephen Harrison
Download or read book Apuleius in European Literature written by Stephen Harrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-17 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Cupid and Psyche is first known through the Latin novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by the second-century AD writer Apuleius—one of the few Latin fictions from Roman antiquity to have survived in its entirety. Apuleius in European Literature: Cupid and Psyche since 1650 examines the reception of the long two-book romantic story of Cupid and Psyche in European literature from 1650 to the present day, with some attention also devoted to fine art and opera across this period. Stephen Harrison and Regine May argue that Cupid and Psyche had a broad and profound influence on certain important and specific areas of European culture; it was appropriated and adapted to suit particular cultural and generic contexts, especially the development of the fairy tale. This constitutes an important strand of the more general reception of the ancient novel, since the tale of Cupid and Psyche is arguably the most famous section of any fiction from Greece or Rome. Apuleius' story has enjoyed an extraordinarily rich reception throughout the five centuries from its rediscovery in the Renaissance to the present day. Previous studies of this reception have focused on the tale's prominence in Renaissance art and literature, or otherwise on its status in the German Romantic period. This book goes further and wider, ranging across literary genres in English, French, German and Dutch, encompassing poetry and drama as well as prose fiction, and covering all the key elements of the tale's reception from 1650 to the present. We hereby rediscover a tale that today remains as relevant and ripe for appropriation as ever.
