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Author: Brian Murdoch
Publisher: Grin of the Gargoyle
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Brian Murdoch provides an alternative view of the Middle Ages, showing the anarchy and decadence which lurked below the surface of a devout and conformist society. The grinning gargoyle, which mocked the solemnity of Gothic cathedrals, symbolises the violence, depravity and irreverence inherent in man which could not be suppressed by the church. Texts translated from the prose, chronicles and verse of the period, such as the Trial of Gilles de Rais, Boccaccio's Decameron, I Have a Gentil Cok, A Black Mass and Metrical Verses on the Subject of his Prick, reveal the wilder aspects of medieval man. Brian Murdoch has assembled and translated texts from Medieval Latin, Old French, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Old and Middle English, Old Irish and Welsh which will redefine the Middle Ages for the modern reader
Author: Brian Murdoch
Publisher: Grin of the Gargoyle
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Get Book Here
Book Description
Brian Murdoch provides an alternative view of the Middle Ages, showing the anarchy and decadence which lurked below the surface of a devout and conformist society. The grinning gargoyle, which mocked the solemnity of Gothic cathedrals, symbolises the violence, depravity and irreverence inherent in man which could not be suppressed by the church. Texts translated from the prose, chronicles and verse of the period, such as the Trial of Gilles de Rais, Boccaccio's Decameron, I Have a Gentil Cok, A Black Mass and Metrical Verses on the Subject of his Prick, reveal the wilder aspects of medieval man. Brian Murdoch has assembled and translated texts from Medieval Latin, Old French, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Old and Middle English, Old Irish and Welsh which will redefine the Middle Ages for the modern reader
Author: Allen Stroud
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538166070
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 579
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Book Description
Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.
Author: Brian Stableford
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810863456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568
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Book Description
Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.
Author: J.-K. Huysmans
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 190765030X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
" Huysmans novel, though it is clearly rooted in the preoccupations of the late 19th century, is remarkably prophetic about the concerns of our own recent fin de siecle. With its allusions to, amongst other things, Satanic child abuse, alternative medicine, New Age philosophy and female sexuality, the novel has clearly a lot to say to a contemporary audience. As with most of Huysmans' books, the pleasure in reading is not necessarily from its overarching plot-line, but in set pieces, such as the extraordinary sequences in which Gilles de Rais wanders through a wood that suddenly metamorphoses into a series of copulating organic forms, the justly famous word-painting of Matthias Grunewald's Crucifixion altar-piece, or the brutally erotic scenes, crackling with sexual tension, between Durtal and Madame Chantelouve. If it is about anything, La-Bas is about Good and Evil. This enlightening new translation will be especially useful to students of literature. Not only does it contain an introduction that puts Huysmans in context for those who are new to his work, it also includes extensive notes to unlock the mass of obscure words that litter the text, and references to a vast array of scientists, false messiahs and misfits whose ideas went into the concoction of this strangely fascinating book." Beryl Bainbridge in The Spectator �This novel is one of the key texts of the Decadent movement of the 1890s and writhes with satanists, occultists, incubi (male demons), succubi (female demons) and intellectuals.” Sophia Martelli in The Observer "This Gothic shocker is not for the faint hearted..." Jerome Boyd Maunsell in The Times "The classic tale of satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century Paris, in an attractive new edition. The novel's enervated anti-hero, Durtal, is writing a book about Gilles de Rais, child-murderer and comrade in arms of Joan of Arc. When he's not swotting up on alchemy, visiting Rais' ruined castle and fantasising about a mystery woman, he is pondering Catholicism with his friends. But his sexual adventures and historical studies mesh when he's invited to witness a black mass. Strong meat for diseased imaginations." Time Out
Author: Johann Grimmelshausen
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1907650121
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
Mike Mitchell�s translation of Simplicissimus was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. �It is a violent and often all-too-realistic picaresque, set in war-torn Europe during the 17th-century Thirty Years War. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, the simple-minded survivor, and we follow him from a childhood in which he loses his parents to the casual atrocities of occupying troops, through his own soldiering adventures, and up to his final vocation as a hermit alone on an island. It is Rabelasian in some respects, but more down to earth and melancholy.” Phil Baker in The Sunday Times �It is the rarest kind of monument to life and literature, for it has survived almost three centuries and will survive many more. It is a story of the most basic kind of grandeur - gaudy, wild, raw, amusing, rollicking and ragged, boiling with life, on intimate terms with death and evil - but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust, but immortal in the miserable splendour of its sins.” Thomas Mann
Author: Ruth Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.
Author: Liz Heron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
This anthology provides a representative selection of a century of French horror writing by such authors as Petrus Borel, Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Baudelaire, and J.K. Huysmans, most appearing for the first time in English. It traces the full development of a genre that initially appeared in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and has been used to explore the most terrifying aspects of science and social life.
Author: Jacques Yonnet
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1907650369
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
In Paris Noir Yonnet tells is about some of the darker quarters of Paris on the left bank of the Seine, centred on the place Mauberge and the rue Mouffetard, as seen from his own experience. It is mainly written during the 1940s, under the Occupation and in the immediate post-war period; there is a certain amount dealing with the resistance, but the main thrust of the book is a Paris that existed between the wars - and is well known from the film noir -but has since disappeared. It concentrates on the people, rather than places, a mixture of ordinary workers, tradesmen, artists, con-men and criminals. It invests the area with a sense of mystery including occasional supernatural events; it is extremely well written, often using the language of the inhabitants of the area. Raymond Queneau considered it the greatest book ever written about Paris. For Dedalus it is the perfect counterfoil for J.K.Huysmans� Parisian Sketches which Dedalus published in 2004 which showed the darker side of Paris pre Haussman�s big boulevards. 'Among the books you must read before you die is Paris Noir by Jacques Yonnet.' Raphael Sorin �Concentrating on the seedy area around Rue Mouffetard, which becomes "La Mouffe" in a typically Parisian abbreviation, Yonnet reveals the dark side of the City of Light in the 1940s in this "secret history of a city".The street life of the Left Bank ticks on much as normal during the Occupation, though Léopoldie the tart stops turning tricks because "the green German uniform does not suit her complexion". Keep- on-Dancin', the killer with a fondness for history, rules the roost. Though describing himself as "sceptical, disillusioned, cynical", Yonnet casually dispatches a traitor in the Resistance. This is film noir in book form." Christopher Hirst in The Independent
Author: Roberta Milliken
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786487925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
It has long been said that a woman's hair is her crowning glory. Indeed, throughout history, hair has remained an important cultural symbol of femininity. In medieval art, iconic images of long, flowing locks can express sexuality, and the cutting of a woman's hair often signals her feminine misbehavior. Artists of all kinds in the Middle Ages used women's long hair to manipulate their audience's estimation of their female figures. This interdisciplinary work explores the significance of women's hair in literature and art from the medieval period through 1525, putting into historical context the ways in which hair participates in construction of the female identity.
Author: Brian Murdoch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191626694
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
The story of the apocryphal pope and saint Gregorius was extremely popular throughout the middle ages and later in Europe and beyond. In a memorable narrative Gregorius is born from an incestuous relationship between a noble brother and sister, and is set out to sea with (unspecific) details of his origin. He is found and brought up by an abbot, but when revealed as a foundling leaves as a knight to seek his origins; he rescues his mother's land from attack, and marries her. On discovering his sin he undertakes years of penance on a rocky islet, which he survives miraculously. An angel sends emissaries from Rome to find him after the death of the pope, the key to his shackles is equally miraculously discovered, and he becomes pope. This hagiographical romance is not a variation upon Oedipus; it uses the invisible sin of incest as a parallel both for original sin (the sin of Adam and Eve) and for actual sin. It combines the universal theme of the quest for identity with the problem not of guilt as such, which is inevitable, but of how sinful humanity can cope with it. Brian Murdoch traces the story's probable origins in medieval England or France, and its later appearance in versions from Iceland and Ireland to Iraq and Egypt, in verse and prose, in full-scale literary forms or in much-reduced folktales, in theological as well as secular contexts, down to Thomas Mann and beyond.
