This book reassesses Hardy's fiction in the light of his prolonged engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on wide research, it demonstrates the pivotal role played in the novels by such customs and beliefs as 'overlooking', hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the 'Portland Custom'. This study shows how such traditions were lived out in practice in village life, and how they were represented in written texts - in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters. It explores tensions between Hardy's repeated insistence on the authenticity of his accounts and his engagement with contemporary anthropologists and folklorists, and reveals how his efforts to resist their 'excellently neat' categories of culture open up wider questions about the nature of belief, progress, and social change.

Cemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun considers the rhetoric of burial reform, cemeterial customs, and epitaphic writing in Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century through the Great War. The first half of the book studies mid- and late-Victorian responses to death and burial, including epitaph collections, burial reform documents, and fictional representations of burial and epitaph writing, especially in the novels of Charles Dickens. The second half studies the same discourse of burial, mourning, and epitaphs in select fiction, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and poems produced in response to World War I in order to understand how writing about individual memorialization changed in post-war British literature and culture.

Glastonbury, a small town in Somerset, England, stands at the epicenter of a longstanding tradition placing the Holy Grail in Britain. Legend holds that Joseph of Arimathea traveled to Britain, bringing with him both a gathering of followers and the cup that Jesus used at the last supper. He is said to have buried the Grail at Glastonbury, where some claim he founded the first church in England. This volume chronicles one man's personal quest to find historical evidence supporting the traditional beliefs surrounding Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail in southern England. Bolstered by an abundance of evidence supporting the presence of Joseph in 1st Century Britain, he separates his findings from the fantasy of the Grail Romances, answering questions about the Grail and the origins and progressions of its legend.

"I have run the gauntlet of many borders in my time, but the border I grew up with at home was far and away the most trying," writes Seamas OCathain, Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin and former Director of the National Folklore Collection. Born in Drumquin, County Tyrone, to a family of Catholic business people and farmers, he grew up "a stone's throw" from the border that separates Donegal in the Republic from the six counties of Northern Ireland - "a border policed by little corporals that was the bane of our lives." JUMPING THE BORDER is an engaging account of his experience - as a child and as a young man - in three distinctive cultures, now radically changed. He describes the Tyrone of the 1940s and 1950s where Protestant and Catholic neighbours shared their lives at a personal level, but where institutions were divisive. His father's prosperous business was ruined because of a political event he supported. The schools and the curriculum were dividers of the two communities. The border was a nuisance to everyone. As a post-graduate student in the 1960s, he took up residence in the Donegal Gaeltacht of "Na Cruacha", where "real old Irish" was still spoken. He did a study of the area's place names, and recorded the distinctive music and speech of "Na Cruacha". Shortly afterwards his research took him to the far north of Europe, to Sapmi (known as Lapland), a cultural rather than a political territory which spreads over four countries, and where he immersed himself in the culture and language of the Sami people at a time when their native language and customs were under threat and belittled. Seamas's many international distinctions and awards include: Knight (First Class) of the Order of the Lion of Finland; the Dag Stromback Prize of the Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala, Sweden; and the Ruth Michaela-Jena Ratcliff Prize, Edinburgh. He is an honorary member of the Finnish Kalevala Society; a member of the Folklore Fellows of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, Helsinki; and a sometime member of the Advisory Board of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

This book takes an engaging look at the significance of traditional proverbs and their variation in the modern world. From sales pitch to propagandistic tool, Wolfgang Mieder looks at how we adapt proverbs to rapidly changing social attitudes - the original wording of proverbs changes to fit modern advertising slogans or political rhetoric, misogynist sayings become feminist slogans, and late medieval woodcuts illustrating proverbs find their modern equivalents in political cartoons and comic strips. The book is richly illustrated and contains name, subject, and proverb indexes.

Spring and summer are my mother's time, autumn and winter are my husband's. What is left for me? Persephone spends six months of the year under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for nine thousand years, since the deal was struck. But when she resurfaces this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control. While Demeter tries to regain her powers and fend off her daughter's husband, who wants to drag his queen back underground for good, Persephone finally gets a taste of freedom, joining a group of protestors. Used to blinking up at the world from below, as she looks down on the earth for the very first time from the treetops with activist Snow, Persephone realises that there are choices she can make for herself. But what will these choices mean for her mother, her husband, and for the new shoots of life inside her? No Season but the Summer takes a classic myth and turns it on its head, asking what will happen when our oldest stories fail us, when all the rules have changed. It is, above all, a book about choice.

Proverbs offer a concise record of folk wisdom and have appeared in oral tradition, literature, art, and popular culture for centuries. Written by the foremost authority on proverbs, this reference gives high school students, undergraduates, and general readers a concise yet comprehensive overview of proverbs in world culture. The volume begins with definitions and classifications of proverbs, followed by discussions of several notable examples. The book then examines approaches to the study of proverbs and the place of proverbs in literature, politics, popular songs, and everyday life. It closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources and a glossary. Included are numerous illustrations.

Just about everyone has heard at least one proverb, and most people have heard more. Proverbs offer a concise record of folk wisdom and have appeared in oral tradition, literature, art, and popular culture for centuries. One of the most varied and fascinating types of folklore, proverbs are studied at all levels and are of interest to a wide range of audiences. Written by the foremost authority on proverbs, this reference gives high school students, undergraduates, and general readers a concise yet comprehensive overview of proverbs in world culture.

The volume begins with definitions and classifications of proverbs and a discussion of their origin and dissemination. It then discusses several representative proverbs from around the world. This is followed by a review of scholarship on proverbs. The book next looks at how several proverbs have appeared in political speeches, literature, popular culture, and everyday life. The handbook closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources and a glossary. Included are numerous photos illustrating the role of proverbs around the world.

The stories presented in Peninnah Schram's highly anticipated Stories within Stories: From the Jewish Oral Tradition are drawn primarily from talmudic and midrashic sources, medieval texts, and the Israel Folktale Archives. Each enchanting story-within-a-story is part of the Jewish oral tradition and continues to enlighten, educate, and entertain audiences as have all of the author's previous works. The types of stories found in this wonderful collection (described by Peninnah Schram as "frame and chain stories") have been widely popular in both Jewish and non-Jewish literary traditions. Since Jews have lived in so many places, they have been influenced by the stories told by their surrounding neighbors. For example, this genre of tales has been especially popular in the Jewish stories of the Middle East, having been influenced by the structure and contents of Arabic literature. Stories within Stories contains fifty stories, mostly made up of folktales. Various types of stories are interspersed so that a humorous story is followed by a romantic tale, which is followed by a religious tale, which is followed by a tall tale, and so on. The stories come from various ethnic communities represented in the Israel Folktale Archives including Morocco, Iraq, Kurdistan, Persia, Yemen, and Eastern Europe. Gifted and highly acclaimed storyteller Peninnah Schram contributes to the ever-growing library of Jewish folklore collections, thus actively helping to restore the rich treasures of Jewish oral tradition in our contemporary world.

This book contains 175 tales drawn equally from the ancient and modern periods of Korea, plus 16 further tales provided for comparative purposes. Nothing else on this scale or depth is available in any western language. Three broad classes of material are included: foundation myths of ancient states and clans, ancient folktales and legends, modern folktales. Each narrative contains information on its source and provenance, and on its folklore type, similarities to folklore types from China, Japan and elsewhere.

Homer and the Poetics of Gesture is the first book of its kind to consider the epic formula in terms that are gestural as well as verbal. Drawing on studies from multiple disciplines, including movement theory, dance studies, phenomenology, and early film, it suggests new approaches for interpreting the relationship between repetition and embodiment in Homer. Through a series of dynamic close readings, Purves argues that the deep-seated habits and gestures of epic bodies are instrumental to our understanding of the Iliad and Odyssey, especially insofar as they attune us to the kinetic structures and sensibilities that shape the meaning of the poems. Each of the chapters isolates a scene in which a specific action, posture, or gesture (falling, running, leaping, standing, and reaching) emerges from the background of its other iterations in order to make larger claims about its poetic significance within the epics as a whole. Beginning from the premise that gestures are shared between characters and often identically repeated within the poems' formulaic system, the book reconsiders long-standing arguments about Homeric agency and character by focusing on those moments when a gesture diverges from its expected course, redirecting the plot or drawing the poem in new and surprising directions. Homer and the Poetics of Gesture not only affords new insights into the nature of epic repetition and poetic originality but also reveals unnoticed connections between Homeric structure and technique and the embodied habits and movements of the characters within the poems.

No new edition of Bulfinch's classic work can be considered complete without some notice of the American scholar to whose wide erudition and painstaking care it stands as a perpetual monument. "The Age of Fable" has come to be ranked with older books like "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," "The Arabian Nights," "Robinson Crusoe," and five or six other productions of world-wide renown as a work with which every one must claim some acquaintance before his education can be called really complete. Many readers of the present edition will probably recall coming in contact with the work as children, and, it may be added, will no doubt discover from a fresh perusal the source of numerous bits of knowledge that have remained stored in their minds since those early years. Yet to the majority of this great circle of readers and students the name Bulfinch in itself has no significance. Thomas Bulfinch was a native of Boston, Mass., where he was born in 1796. His boyhood was spent in that city, and he prepared for college in the Boston schools. He finished his scholastic training at Harvard College, and after taking his degree was for a period a teacher in his home city. For a long time later in life he was employed as an accountant in the Boston Merchants' Bank. His leisure time he used for further pursuit of the classical studies which he had begun at Harvard, and his chief pleasure in life lay in writing out the results of his reading, in simple, condensed form for young or busy readers. The plan he followed in this work, to give it the greatest possible usefulness, is set forth in the Author's Preface.

How does sport shape society? This book seeks to answer this question by examining the meaning of sport in French society and the construction of local, national and, increasingly, global identities through sport. It begins by reassessing modern sport's emergence and consolidation in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then traces developments from the Second World War to the present, reflecting on the current status and future role of French sport. Horse racing, cycling, tennis, adventure sports, rugby and football, as well as the role of the Olympic Games, are discussed. The author investigates the interaction of these mass and elite physical practices with a wide variety of sporting locations - spatial and temporal, concrete and imagined - and in a rich field of representations, including literature and the fine arts, the press, cinema, radio, television and digital media. Related concepts of sporting celebrity, stardom and heroism also inform the discussion, offering new contributions to this developing critical area.

On the surface, the zombie seems the polar opposite of the human--they are the living dead; we, in essence, are the dying alive. But the zombie is also "us." Although decaying, it looks like us, dresses like us, and sometimes (if rarely) acts like us. In this volume, essays by scholars from a range of disciplines examine the zombie as a thematic presence in literature, film, video games, legal language, and philosophy, exploring topics including zombies and the environment, litigation, the afterlife, capitalism, and the erotic. Through this wide-ranging examination of the zombie phenomenon, the authors seek to discover what the zombie can teach us about being human.

There is more material available on Herakles than any other Greek god or hero. His story has many more episodes than those of other heroes, concerning his life and death as well as his battles with myriad monsters and other opponents. In literature, he appears in our earliest Greek epic and lyric poetry, is reinvented for the tragic and comic stage, and later finds his way into such unlikely areas as philosophical writing and love poetry. In art, his exploits are amongst the earliest identifiable mythological scenes, and his easily-recognisable figure with lionskin and club was a familiar sight throughout antiquity in sculpture, vase-painting and other media. He was held up as an ancestor and role-model for both Greek and Roman rulers, and widely worshipped as a god, his unusual status as a hero-god being reinforced by the story of his apotheosis. Often referred to by his Roman name Hercules, he has continued to fascinate writers and artists right up to the present day.

In Herakles, Emma Stafford has successfully tackled the Herculean task of surveying both the ancient sources and the extensive modern scholarship in order to present a hugely accessible account of this important mythical figure. Covering both Greek and Roman material, the book highlights areas of consensus and dissent, indicating avenues for further study on both details and broader issues. Easy to read, Herakles is perfectly suited to students of classics and related disciplines, and of interest to anyone looking for an insight into ancient Greece s most popular hero.

There is more material available on Herakles than any other Greek god or hero.aHis story has many more episodes than those of other heroes, concerning his life and death as well as his battles with myriad monsters and other opponents.aIn literature, he appears in our earliest Greek epic and lyric poetry, is reinvented for the tragic and comic stage, and later finds his way into such unlikely areas as philosophical writing and love poetry.? In art, his exploits are amongst the earliest identifiable mythological scenes, and his easily-recognisable figure with lionskin and club was a familiar sight throughout antiquity in sculpture, vase-painting and other media.aHe was held up as an ancestor and role-model for both Greek and Roman rulers, and widely worshipped as a god, his unusual status as a hero-god being reinforced by the story of his apotheosis.aOften referred to by his Roman name Hercules, he has continued to fascinate writers and artists right up to the present day.

In Herakles, Emma Stafford has successfully tackled the OCyHerculean taskOCO of surveying both the ancient sources and the extensive modern scholarship in order to present a hugely accessible account of this important mythical figure.aCovering both Greek and Roman material, the book highlights areas of consensus and dissent, indicating avenues for further study on both details and broader issues.aEasy to read, Herakles is perfectly suited to students of classics and related disciplines, and of interest to anyone looking for an insight into ancient GreeceOCOs most popular hero.

a

Hawaiian Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods (1915) is a collection of Hawaiian folktales and myths by W. D. Westervelt. Connecting the origin story of Hawaii to the traditions of other Polynesian cultures, Westervelt provides an invaluable resource for understanding the historical and geographical scope of Hawaiian culture. Drawing on the work of David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and Abraham Fornander, Westervelt, originally from Ohio, became a leading authority on the Hawaiian Islands, publishing extensively on their legends, religious beliefs, and folk tales. "The legends of the Hawaiian Islands are as diverse as those of any country in the world. They are also entirely distinct in form and thought from the fairy-tales which excite the interest and wonder of the English and German children. The mythology of Hawaii follows the laws upon which all myths are constructed." Part ethnography, part geological description, Westervelt's work is a powerful celebration of the cultural traditions of the Hawaiian Islands. In these legends, ghosts and gods interact with the environment and the daily lives of islanders, shaping human society and the land itself. Highlights include the story of the Wauhaula heiau, or temple, the legend of the enraged Hau-pu and the Rock of Kauai, and the tale of Nanaue, the shark-man of Waipio Valley. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W. D. Westervelt's Hawaiian Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods is a classic of Hawaiian literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Masks of God is the summation of Joseph Campbell's lifelong study of the origins and function of myth. In this volume, Occidental Mythology, Campbell examines the themes that underlie the art, worship and literature of the Western world. Occidental Mythology traces European consciousness from the Levantine earth-goddesses of the Bronze Age and the subsequent tribal invasions that shaped Judaic and Greek myth before examining the influence of Persia, Rome, Islam and Christian Europe on ancient beliefs. The Masks of God traces mankind's history as a search for meaning through ideas, themes and quests of culture and religion.

Anteros: A Forgotten Myth explores how the myth of Anteros disappears and reappears throughout the centuries, from classical Athens to the present day, and looks at how the myth challenges the work of Freud, Lacan, and Jung, among others. It examines the successive cultural experiences that formed and inform the myth and also how the myth sheds light on individual human experience and the psychoanalytic process.

Topics of discussion include:

• Anteros in the Italian Renaissance, the French Enlightenment and English Modernism
• psychologizing Anteros: Freud, Lacan, Girard, and Jung
• three anterotic moments in a consulting room.

This book presents an important argument at the boundaries of the disciplines of analytical psychology, psychoanalysis, art history, and mythology. It will therefore be essential reading for all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as art historians and those with an interest in the meeting of psychoanalytic thought and mythology.

Wisdom's Way is a collection of true stories from ancient China. Filled with palace intrigue, ambitious warlords, greedy swindlers, and justice-seeking wise men, each story evokes the legendary wisdom of the Far East. These delightful tales offer both historical lessons and insight into human relationships, from the grand maneuvering of emperors to a pair of tradesmen arguing over an old coat.

First published in 1960. Over a century ago the Chinese discovered in a sealed-up cave in the west of China a collection of manuscripts dating from the fifth century to the end of the tenth. These included many specimens of popular literature of a kind that was not previously known to exist. Although the find was made long ago, only two or three of these pieces had been translated before. Arthur Waley here translates, whole or as extracts, twenty-six pieces, making an invaluable addition to world literature.

From the beginning of time, the physical characteristics of the world around us have shaped the way we think and live. Early cultures felt closer to nature than society does today, and the most vivid imagery of the physical world is to be found often in ancient myths from throughout the world.

A unique description and analysis of the domains and genres of UAE folklore, including folk customs and beliefs, traditional arts and crafts, folk dances, folk narratives and proverbs. Challenging the established meaning of folklife, this volume also deals with folklore in public life, in the mass media, in education and in politics.

Henry W. Shoemaker (1880-1958) was known for his deep love for the wilderness and native cultures of Pennsylvania. The state's first official folklorist, he wrote more than twenty books detailing Pennsylvania's modern mythology. Pennsylvania Mountain Stories is perhaps Shoemaker's definitive collection of folktales.

The idea for this book came to Shoemaker during his college years, when he spent his vacations traveling through the mountains of Pennsylvania--on foot, on horseback, or by buggy. He claimed that he heard the stories, "mostly after supper," from people he met at lumber camps, farmhouses, and backwoods taverns. "As so many of the tales are devoted to subjects of a more or less supernatural order they cannot very well be true," he writes, but then hastens to add, "neither are they of the author's invention."

In this ethereal space between fact and fiction, Pennsylvania Mountain Stories reveals the values, the passions, the obsessions of the people who told them. This volume, published under the Metalmark Books imprint, contains a facsimile reproduction of the 1911 edition, originally published by the Reading Times Publishing Company.