Latest update of essential Arthurian resource. A must for any self-respecting library. NOTES AND QUERIES A standard work of reference. ENGLISH STUDIES With the appearance in 1999 of the very extensive interim volume covering the years 1978 to 1992, the Arthurian Bibliography became once more the critical source for Arthurian Scholars. This fourth volume of entries, culled in the main from BBSIA, covers the years 1993 to 1998 inclusive. The cumulative volumes of the Bibliography offer an exhaustive author and title database of the burgeoning scholarship in the field of Arthurian studies since the inception of the project at Hull over 30 years ago, reflecting the major advances in the field and the continuing relevance of Arthurian material in medieval studies.

Witches, fairies, unicorns, giants, dwarves, gnomes, and talking animals. Folk tales feature many magical creatures and larger or smaller than life entities and are great for pastime activities. What if such enchanted beings are replaced by familiar figures of kings, queens, lords, peasants, pirates, and slaves? What if folk tales are given center stage to understand the international politics and sociocultural matters of a milieu? By analyses of Italian folktales and the notion of Other as represented by Turks and Moors, the book is premised to address the clashing, bifurcating, and intersecting paths of the ruling classes and the subaltern groups and is set to throw a light on the convoluted hegemonic relations between different strata in the Italian society in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries.

This book traces the origin of the legend of El Dorado and the various expeditions that set out to locate that mysterious land of untold wealth in South America. Motivated by both fanciful rumors of a golden city ruled by a man who coated himself daily with gold dust, and the more practical allure of a region abundant in cinnamon trees (a spice that was worth its weight in gold to Europeans), many conquistadors convinced themselves that another native empire awaited their conquest. These quests for fortune and glory would lead to an encounter with fierce female warriors who were believed to be the Amazons of ancient Greek lore, and the discovery of the mighty river later named for the legendary Amazon tribe. The first half of this book details the lesser-known accounts of German interest in locating the wealth of a golden kingdom called Xerira and an elusive passage at Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo which supposedly led to the Pacific Ocean. The second section focuses on the various Spanish efforts to discover El Dorado, each of which was eventually doomed to despair, disappointment, and death.

The Greek myths are timeless classics, whose scenes and figures have captivated us since ancient times. The gods and heroes of these legends hold up a mirror to the human condition, embodying universal characteristics and truths - whether it be the courage of Perseus, the greed of Midas, the vaulting ambition of Icarus, the vengeance of Medea, or the hubris of Niobe. These traits are the basis for immortal dramas and rich narratives, as profound as they are entertaining, which form the bedrock of our culture and literature today and remain relevant and fascinating for all readers, young and old alike. This edition contains 47 tales based on the most famous episodes in Greek mythology, from Prometheus, the Argonauts, and Theseus to the Trojan War and Homer's Odyssey. The individual texts are selected from the seminal work Sagen des klassischen Altertums (Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece) by Gustav Schwab (1792-1850), and strikingly illustrated by 29 artists, among them outstanding representatives of the Golden Age of Book Illustration and the Arts and Crafts Movement, including Walter Crane (1845-1915), Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), William Russell Flint (1880-1969), and Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900-1930). These illustrations are complemented by scene-setting vignettes for each story and a genealogical tree of Greek gods and goddesses by Clifford Harper, commissioned especially for this volume. Placing the tales in context, the book contains a historical introduction by Dr. Michael Siebler and is rounded off with biographies of all featured artists as well as an extensive glossary of ancient Greece's most famous protagonists. The heroism, tragedy, and theater of Greek mythology glimmer through each tale in this lavishly illustrated edition, awakening the gods and heroes to new life.

J. R. R. Tolkien is arguably the most influential fantasy writer of all time-his world building and epic mythology have changed Western audiences' imaginations and the entire fantasy genre. This book is the first wide-ranging Christian Platonic reading on Tolkien's fiction. This analysis, written for scholars and general Tolkien enthusiasts alike, discusses how his fiction is constructed on levels of language, myth and textuality that have a background in the Greek philosopher Plato's texts and early Christian philosophy influenced by Plato. It discusses the concepts of ideal and real, creation and existence, and fall and struggle as central elements of Tolkien's fiction, focusing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth. Reading Tolkien's fiction as a depiction of ideal and real, from the vision of creation to the process of realization, illuminates a part of Tolkien's aesthetics and mythology that previous studies have overlooked.

This volume is based on the premise that artistic performance is epistemological, a way of knowing self, culture, and other. The nine essays in this book, based on a broad range of ethnic, racial, and gender groups, share a common interest in exploring how performance reveals, shapes, and sometimes transforms personal and cultural identity. Editors Fine and Speer begin by examining the interdisciplinary roots of performance studies and the role of performance studies in the field of communication. They also discuss the power of performance to shape personal and cultural identity.

The first two chapters explore the ritual nature of performance in two different cultural contexts: an African-American church service and an Appalachian storytelling event of the legendary Ray Hicks. In both arenas, the performers act as shamans, transporting the audience from their everyday, secular lives to the higher ground of the mythic spheres of heroic and fantastic events. The next three chapters discuss the notion of place and performance in various landscapes--the English countryside, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the farmland of the Midwest. Through analysis of the speech and songs of a modern Sussex yeoman, the ghost tales of Appalachian storytellers, and the narratives of Midwest farmers coping with hard times, the authors reveal a variety of ways in which narrative performances function to preserve people's relationship with the land. The last four chapters share a focus on women as storytellers. One chapter offers a feminist critique of personal narrative research and challenges normative assumptions about the storytelling behavior of women. Another chapter interprets a narration of a Galician woman's typical day to reveal how the performance expresses deeply held attitudes and beliefs of her cultural community. Words are not the only medium that women use to tell their stories. The next chapter examines the story cloths of Hmong women refugees from Laos as intercultural and dialogical performances. The last chapter explores self-discovery and identity in the storytelling of a woman in the last years of her life. This volume is particularly representative of the ways in which communication scholars approach performance studies, but will also interest researchers and students of folklore, anthropology, sociology, theatre, and related disciplines.

The triumphant conclusion to both the Fall of Shannara series and the entire Shannara saga - a truly epic final adventure from the master of modern fantasy. As the Four Lands reels under the Skaar invasion, its defenders must decide what they will risk to save their home. As one group remains to protect the Four Lands, another undertakes a perilous journey across the sea to the Skaar homeland, carrying with them a new piece of technology that could change the face of the world forever. And yet a third is trapped in a deadly realm from which there may be no escape. Packed with all of the hallmarks of Terry Brooks's magnificent storytelling, The Last Druid is a fitting end to a saga that has enthralled millions of readers around the world. Praise for Terry Brooks: 'I can't even begin to count how many of Terry Brooks's books I've read (and re-read) over the years' Patrick Rothfuss 'Terry's place is at the head of the fantasy world' Philip Pullman 'I would not be writing epic fantasy today if not for Shannara' Peter V. Brett 'A master of the craft . . . required reading' Brent Weeks

A hilarious modern fairy-tale mash-up set in a world in which witches are real, magic is real and fairy tales are not only real ... but recent history. Roxy Humperdinck is still reeling from the Great Fairy Tale Cover-up when Cinderella Jones returns with a new mission: to investigate The Missing - the children who followed the Pied Piper into the mountain thirty years ago, never to be seen again. And so begins another crazy adventure that takes the girls up Jack's beanstalk, through Red Riding Hood's Woods ... and to the cottage of the most evil villain of all time, the Gingerbread Witch.

Using a cultural approach to classical myths, this book examines how they affect psychoanalytic theory, historical experience, elite culture, popular culture, and everyday life. Berger explores diverse topics such as the Oedipus Myth, James Bond, Star Wars, and fairy tales.

This book explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the Middle Ages to the present day has stood up for the values of natural law and true justice. Analysing the whole sequence of Robin Hood adventures, it begins with the medieval tradition, including early poems and the long-surviving sung ballads, and goes on to look at two variant Robins: the Scottish version, here named Rabbie Hood, and gentrified Robin, the exiled Earl of Huntington, now partnered by Lady Marian. The nineteenth century re-imagined Robin as a modern figure - a lover of nature, Marian, England and the rights of the ordinary man. In novels and films he has developed into an international figure of freedom, while Marian's role has grown in a modern feminist context. Even to this day, the Robin Hood myth continues to reproduce itself, constantly discovering new forms and new meanings. -- .

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged.

Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores 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 battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions?

Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew--such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar--and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

Following in the tradition of recent work by cultural geographers and historians of maps, this collection examines the apparently familiar figure of Robin Hood as he can be located within spaces that are geographical, cultural, and temporal. The volume is divided into two sections: the first features an interrogation of the literary and other textually transmitted spaces to uncover the critical grounds in which the Robin Hood 'legend' has traditionally operated. The essays in Part Two take up issues related to performative and experiential space, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between page, stage, and lived experience. Throughout the volume, the contributors contend with, among other things, modern theories of gender, literary detective work, and the ways in which the settings that once advanced court performances now include digital gaming and the enactment of 'real' lives.

This book presents an original and engaging look at contemporary popular culture, opening with the provocative idea that this is a day and age of complete exhaustion of ideas, images, stories, and myths. Questioning the effects of content recycling in cinema and other media, the author further elaborates on the repurposing of cultural junk, the reassembling of narratives and myths. The thought-provoking hypothesis proposed in this research is that we have entered an age of cultural promiscuity. By analyzing the mutations of myth-making practices and connecting them with larger cultural manifestations, the author explains these transformations as integral to the development of a myth-illogical imagination. Cinematic and mythological representations in mainstream Hollywood films have reached a point of amalgamation with no return, which marks the beginning of a "fourth age of representations," where signs and meanings are manifested in illogical permutations. This is more explicit in films that commingle aliens, cowboys, undead American presidents, and zombie nazis, joining together in the same narrative ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, aggregating disjoined storylines and historical fake facts, all coalesced in an orgy of empty burlesque and infantile masquerades. This interdisciplinary research combines cultural studies, film criticism, art and myth interpretations, bringing into the debate multiple concepts from related fields such as critical theory and media criticism. The book also opens up to innovative approaches from a wide array of academic disciplines, offering researchers, students and those fascinated by the transformations happening in contemporary cinema an interpretative tool based on a revised dialectic approach. The conclusion is that we are now victims of a zombie semiotics. Meaning-making in contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics is dominated by a process of incessant desecration of significations, specific to the total mishmash of representations analyzed here.

Over a hundred years ago, the citizens of F- did something rather bad. And local school teacher Catherine Evans has made writing the definitive account of what happened when Ilsbeth Clark drowned in the well her life's work. The town's people may not want their past raked up, but Catherine is determined to shine a light upon that shameful event. For Ilsbeth was an innocent, after all. She was shunned and ostracised by rumour-mongers and ill-wishers and someone has to speak up for her. And who better than Catherine, who has herself felt the sting and hurt of such whisperings? But then a childhood friend returns to F -. Elena is a successful author whose book, The Whispers Inside: A Reawakening of the Soul, has earned her a certain celebrity. In search of a new subject, she takes an interest in the story of Ilsbeth Clark and announces her intention to write a book about the long-dead woman, focusing on the natural magic she believes she possessed. And Elena has everything Catherine has not, like a platform and connections and no one seems to care that Elena's book will be pure speculation, tainting Ilsbeth's memory rather than preserving it. Catherine is determined that something must be done and plots to blunt her rival's pen. However she had not allowed for the fact that the past might not be so dead after all - that something is reaching out from the well, disturbing her reality. Before summer's over, one woman will be dead, the other accused of murder . . . but is she really guilty, or are there other forces at work? And who was Ilsbeth Clark, really? An innocent? A witch? Or something else entirely?

The original Star Wars trilogy famously follows Joseph Campbell's model for the hero's journey, making Luke Skywalker's story the new hero quest for a modern age. With the nine-plus film saga complete, however, new story patterns have emerged as the hero's journey is imagined over and over for characters of different ages, genders, and backgrounds. The prequels offer the plot arc of the villain's journey through Anakin. Leia and Padme, while damsels in the men's story, break out to undergo their own ordeals. The heroine's journey is exemplified by Rey and Jyn. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Vader must accept the loss of power and fade into spirit guardians, perpetuating the lifecycle. By the sequel era, the original trio become mentors to the younger generation and finally must do the same. Meanwhile, the Mandalorian explores a different form of the quest as he transforms from immature warrior to patriarch. This book tracks the journeys of over 20 characters throughout the franchise.

Breaking box office records around the globe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has achieved an unparalleled level of success and gripped the imaginations of fans across the world, raising the films to a higher level of narrative: myth. Using the field of religious studies, this is the first book to analyze the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a modern myth, comparing it to epics, symbols, rituals, and stories from multiple world religious traditions. By exploring how the characters and events of the MCU resemble religious themes and ancient mythic stories, this book places the exploits of Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and the other stars of the Marvel films, alongside the legends of Achilles, Gilgamesh, Arjuna, the Buddha, and many others. It examines their origin stories and rites of passage, the monsters, shadow-selves, and familial conflicts they contend with, and the symbols of death and the battle against it that stalk them at every turn. As a result, we can appreciate how the films deal with timeless human dilemmas and questions, evoking an enduring sense of adventure and wonder common across world mythic traditions.

The Slender Man entered the general popular consciousness in May 2014, when two young girls led a third girl into a wooded area and stabbed her. Examining the growth of the online horror phenomenon, this book introduces unique attributes of digital culture and establishes a needed framework for studies of other Internet memes and mythologies.

Rediscover the magic of Russian folktales in a breathtaking illustrated edition. This collection of traditional stories will sweep you away to the birch forests and ornate palaces of Russia. You'll meet a mysterious girl born from the snow, a terrifying Baba Yaga, and a series of dauntless heroines and heroes willing to fight dragons and cross fiery rivers. Blending whimsical magic with magnificent drama, these tales come to life alongside intricate contemporary art in this special illustrated edition. POPULAR SERIES: The Tales series gives new life to traditional stories. Celebrating the richness of folklore around the world, and featuring the work of beloved contemporary illustrators, these books are treasured by adults and teens alike. ICONIC STORIES: Russian stories hold a special place in the hearts of fairy tales fans. Unforgettable characters like Baba Yaga and the Fire-Bird have captured imaginations for generations. In this collection, readers are sure to find old favorites and discover something new. GORGEOUS SPECIAL EDITION: With a mesmerizing full-page illustration for each story, as well as creamy paper, a ribbon page marker, and a handsome hardcover design, this edition is perfect for gifting and display. Perfect for: * Fans of fairy tales and folklore * Readers with Russian heritage or interested in Russian culture * Illustration and art lovers * Adults and teens * Collectors of illustrated classics * Fans of the illustrator Dinara Mirtalipova

Gloucestershire's stories go back to the days of Sabrina, spirit of the Severn, and the Nine Hags of Gloucester. Tales tell of sky-ships over Bristol, the silk-caped wraith of Dover's Hill, snow foresters on the Cotswolds, and Cirencester's dark-age drama of snake and nipple. They uncover the tragic secrets of Berkeley Castle and the Gaunts' Chapel, a lonely ghost haunting an ancient inn, and twenty-first-century beasts in the Forest of Dean. From the intrigue and romance of town and abbey to the faery magic of the wild, here are thirty of the county's most enchanting tales, brought imaginatively to life by a dynamic local storyteller.

Between 1651 and 1740 hundreds of fables, fable collections, and biographies of the ancient Greek slave Aesop were published in England. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis decribes the explosion of interest in fable from its origins at the end of the English Civil Wars to its decline, and shows how three Augustan writers--John Dryden, Anne Finch and John Gay--experimented with fable as a literary form. Often underestimated because of its links with popular nonliterary forms, fable is shown to have played a major role in the formation of the modern English culture.

In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Broadman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and Russian vampires in popular culture, and the vampire in contemporary novels, film and television. The essays in this collection continue that multi-cultural and multigeneric discussion by tracing the development of the post-modern vampire, in films ranging from Shadow of a Doubt to Blade, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Interview with the Vampire; the male and female vampires in the Twilight films, Sookie Stackhouse novels and True Blood television series; the vampire in African American women s fiction, Anne Rice s novels and in the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend; vampires in Japanese anime; and finally, to bring the volumes full circle, the presentation of a new Irish Dracula play, adapted from the novel and set in 1888.

This book, first published in 1990, studies the oral fiction entertainments of Afghanistan by focusing on aspects of the oral narrative process which can be observed in individual performances.