The mythology and folklore of England is as old as the land itself, rich in symbolism and full of tales of quests and heroic daring-do, ghosts and witches, romantic heroines and noble outlaws. Who hasn't heard of the master sorcerer Merlin, Robin Hood and his merry men, or the legendary monster Grendel? Beginning with the great Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, English Myths explores the early legends of post-Roman England, many of which blend history and myth. The book goes on to examine the rich seam of Arthurian and romantic legends first told in the Medieval era, before looking at English folk heroes and the beasts, witches and ghosts that have haunted the land. Discover the brothers Hengist and Horsa, legendary leaders of the first Angles, Saxons and Jutes to settle in England; learn the tragic story of Cornish hero Tristan and his love for Irish princess Iseult; tremble at the Black Dog ghost, a nocturnal hellhound found stalking the country from Suffolk in the east to Devon in the west; and enjoy the tale of George and the dragon, who saved the nation from a rampaging serpent and became the patron saint of the country. Illustrated with 150 photographs and artworks, English Myths is an accessible, entertaining and highly informative exploration of the fascinating mythology underlying one of the world's oldest and most influential cultures.

Proverbs supposedly contain the wisdom of the common folk--eternal truths to be passed down through the ages. They are short, often humorous, expressions that teach lessons or give practical advice, and they are perhaps the best indicators of attitudes and beliefs of any form of folklore. Not only reflecting culture, proverbs also perpetuate the cultural dictates of the past, including the fears, prejudices, and misconceptions of their predominately male authors. Because they are generalizations, proverbs sometimes impede accurate observation and analysis and stifle original thought. Like many other traditions and cultural practices, proverbs often promote misleading stereotypes of women. This reference book collects more than 800 American proverbs about women and analyzes their significance. The volume begins with introductory chapters that explore the relationship between proverbs and culture and the image of women presented in proverbs. The chapters that follow are devoted to particular categories, such as wives and 6~rriage, mothers and daughters, women as property, and old women and grandmothers. Each chapter includes a brief introductory overview and a listing of proverbs relating to the topic. The proverbs were gathered through an extensive review of journal articles, proverb dictionaries, and other literature. In addition to true proverbs, the volume includes some phrases, sayings, and proverbial comparisons. Not included are expressions that contain words like "mother" or "daughter" but do not really describe women or comment about them. The book then presents a concluding analysis of how American proverbs portray women, an alphabetical index of proverbs, and an extensivebibliography.

What is the origin of the stories of the Round Table, of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, of Sir Launcelot and Guinevere? And where was Camelot?King Arthur's name has echoed down the centuries, conjuring up rich images of mystery and power, chivalry and romance. But did he exist at all? There is no evidence to prove he reigned in the fifth and sixth centuries; no eye-witness accounts of his coronation and no reliable manuscripts outlining his deeds. This full-colour guide examines the facts of the legends in the tantalising puzzle of King Arthur and his knights. Learn about the origins of the Round Table, the cult of chivalry and conflict between knights, and Arthur's shape-shifting half-sister Moran le Fay. From the origins of Arthurian legend to the new phase in the Arthurian cyce in the romantic revival of the early nineteenth century, read about the tantalizing puzzle that is King Arthur.Look out for more Pitkin guides on the very best of British history, heritage and travel.

Folklore has long explored food as a core component of life, linked to identity, aesthetics, and community and connecting individuals to larger contexts of history, culture and power. It recognizes that we gather together to eat, define class, gender, and race by food production, preparation, and consumption, celebrate holidays and religious beliefs with food, attach meaning to the most mundane of foods, and evoke memories and emotions through our food selections and presentations. "The Food and Folklore Reader "is the first comprehensive introduction to folklore methods and concepts relevant to food, spanning the entire discipline with key sources drawn from around the globe. Whilst folklore approaches have long permeated food studies, this is the first dedicated reader to introduce those ideas and to encourage students of food to explore them in their own work.Internationally respected editor Lucy M. Long offers expert commentary and rich learning features to aid teaching. Definitive in scale and scope, the reader covers the history of food in folklore scholarship whilst also highlighting food studies approaches and concepts for folklore readers.From seminal works on identity and aesthetics to innovative scholarship on contemporary food issues such as culinary tourism and food security, this will be an essential resource for food studies, folklore studies and anthropology.

This book starts with a historical description of the economic development of the various regions within the United States from 1870 together with an analytical discussion of the broad factors affecting the location of economic activity. It then proceeds to a detailed statistical analysis of the state-by-state movement of employment between the 1939 Census of Manufactures and 1958. The last chapter is devoted to programs which may help bring a better balance of labor force and employment opportunity.

The comparison made between Prometheus and Faust occurs so frequently in modern scholarship as to seem commonplace. However, while each figure has been investigated separately, no recent full-length study has brought the two characters together and examined the association. The present volume explores the Prometheus myth from its preliterary origins through treatments in Greek by Hesiod, Aeschylus, Plato, and Lucian, as well as in Latin literature and Roman theatricals. The investigation continues into hitherto unexplored connections with the Greek figure and the magus and occult scientist types of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Renaissance. The Prometheus and Faust traditions met in literature and art soon after the emergence of the historical Faustus. The traditions continued to exist independently through the 16th and 17th centuries, until Goethe began to write a play about each character. Ultimately Goethe abandoned Prometheus; however, Faust absorbed much of the Promethean persona.

This innovative book provides an original approach to the analysis of the representation of myth, ritual, and magic in African literature. Emphasizing the ambivalent nature of the sacred, it advances work on the religious dimension of canonical African texts and attends to the persistence of pre-colonial cultures in postcolonial spaces.

Translated here into English for the first time, F. W. J. Schelling's 1842 lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology are an early example of interdisciplinary thinking. In seeking to show the development of the concept of the divine Godhead in and through various mythological systems (particularly of ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East), Schelling develops the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions. In so doing, he brings together the essential relatedness of the development of philosophical systems, human language, history, ancient art forms, and religious thought. Along the way, he engages in analyses of modern philosophical views about the origins of philosophy's conceptual abstractions, as well as literary and philological analyses of ancient literature and poetry.

Myths of the Nation focuses on the construction of forms of historical consciousness in narratives, or schools of narrative. The study seeks to underscore what goes behind the writing of `true' and `authentic' histories by treating historical fiction as the literary dimension of nationalist ideology. It traces nationalism from its abstract underpinnings to its concrete manifestation in historical fiction which underwrites the Indian freedom struggle. The construction of identity through mythicized conceptions of India is examined in detail through Raja Rao's first novel, Kanthapura. The key concept governing the subject is that of representation. Since the `fictional reality' of the nation is a much debated issue, the study examines how history slides into fiction. The author shows how orientalist, nationalist, Marxist, subalternists, and poststructuralists, have all, in their own celebratory ways, used the disenfranchised sub-proletariat in their works. What she finds useful in poststructuralist practices, however, is that subaltern identities are imbued with heterogeneity, thus splitting open an authoritarian and reactionary nationalism, and a continuing neo-colonialism.

Despite protestations to the contrary, myth criticism in literature is not dead: witness the well over 1000 illuminating sources published between 1970 and 1990 selected from thousands more and provided with succinct informative annotations. The modern study of the relation between myths and literature began in the late 19th century with publication of James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough and reached a high water mark with Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism beginning in the late 1950s. The "end of modernism" proclaimed in the late 1960s seemed also to toll the death knell for myth criticism, which was denigrated by some "new critics" of the "post-modernist" era. Instead, however, the authors here have found a wealth of recent materials, some proceeding from traditional psychological or anthropological stances and others taking new directions: studying relationships between myth and language and myth and history, viewing myth as part of the complex fabric of fiction rather than its core, and accommodating feminist theory, among other approaches. The variety of narratives accorded the status of myth has also prompted inquiries on mythopoesis, or the literary creation of myth. The opening chapter surveys work done on the mythic or archetypal approach in general and on such mythic figures in literature as Orpheus, Oedipus, Cain, and Faust; the second chapter covers works on myth in classical literature; and the following five chapters correspond to major periods in British and American literature. Included are general studies and studies of particular authors, notably among them such giants of the past as Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Joyce, and Faulkner, but also including suchcontemporary writers as Toni Morrison and John Updike. A well-constructed subject index provides access throughout to mythical figures and literary figures as well as major theories and theorists, topics, and themes; and an author index accesses the critical studies.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable and enthusiastic increase of interest in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Japan. The legends of these temples and shrines are recorded in many historical manuscripts and these genealogies have such great significance that some of them have been registered as national treasures of Japan. They are indispensable to elucidate the history of these temples and shrines, in addition to the formation process of the ancient Japanese nation. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the genealogies and legends of ancient Japanese clans. It advances the study of ancient Japanese history by utilizing new analytical perspective from not only the well-known historical manuscripts relied upon by previous researchers, but also valuable genealogies and legends that previous researchers largely neglected.

The Truth of Myth is a thorough and accessible introduction to the study of myth, surveying the intellectual history of the topic, methods for studying myth cross-culturally, and emerging trends. Readers will encounter insightful commentaries on such questions as: What is the relation of mythology to religion? To science? To popular culture? Did the events recounted in myths actually occur? Why does the term "myth" have so many contradictory definitions and connotations? Offering serious students with an intellectual "toolkit" for launching into this fascinating field, the book is especially useful in conjunction with case studies of individual mythological traditions.

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aPersuasively argued...A fascinating study that makes a real contribution to discussions of health, wellness and faith in America.a
--"Publishers Weekly"

"An exploration of the history and practices of black healers and healing illuminating the vital cultural, intellectual, and spiritual expression of a people. This fine multidisciplinary work draws deeply and thoughtfully from the experiences and words of its subjects, offering alternative visions of human creativity, resistance, and community."
--Yvonne Chireau, author of "Black Magic: Religion and the African-American Conjuring Tradition"

Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo.

Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.

This book was first published in 2004. Plato, Aristophanes and the creators of the 'Orphic' gold tablets employ the traditional tale of a journey to the realm of the dead to redefine, within the mythic narrative, the boundaries of their societies. Rather than being the relics of a faded ritual tradition or the products of Orphic influence, these myths can only reveal their meanings through a close analysis of the specific ways in which each author makes use of the tradition. For these authors, myth is an agonistic discourse, neither a kind of sacred dogma nor a mere literary diversion, but rather a flexible tool that serves the wide variety of uses to which it is put. The traditional tale of the journey to the Underworld in Greek mythology is neither simple nor single, but each telling reveals a perspective on the cosmos, a reflection of the order of this world through the image of the other.

In the lost mountains of Haiti, strange beings with powerful magic powers, periodically go down to the town to capture the most bright people in order to transmit them secrets of ancient African mages for the concretization of a sublime mission.