Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds PDF Author: Marina Warner
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199266840
Category : Fantastic, The
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation. Shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape ofmagic, witchcraft, and wonder, and enlivens classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and uncanny fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of essays, given as the Clarendon Lectures in English 2001, takes four dominant processes of metamorphosis: Mutating, Hatching,Splitting, and Doubling, and explores their metaphorical power in the evication of human personality. Marina Warner traces this story against a background of historical encounters with different cultures, especially with the Caribbean. Beginning with Ovid's great poem, The Metamorphoses, as thefounding text of the metamorphic tradition, she takes us on a journey of exploration, into the fantastic art of Hieronymous Bosch, the legends of the Taino people, the life cycle of the butterfly, the myth of Leda and the Swan, the genealogy of the Zombie, the pantomime of Aladdin, the haunting ofdoppelgangers, the coming of photography, and the late fiction of Lewis Carroll.

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds PDF Author: Marina Warner
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199266840
Category : Fantastic, The
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation. Shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape ofmagic, witchcraft, and wonder, and enlivens classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and uncanny fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of essays, given as the Clarendon Lectures in English 2001, takes four dominant processes of metamorphosis: Mutating, Hatching,Splitting, and Doubling, and explores their metaphorical power in the evication of human personality. Marina Warner traces this story against a background of historical encounters with different cultures, especially with the Caribbean. Beginning with Ovid's great poem, The Metamorphoses, as thefounding text of the metamorphic tradition, she takes us on a journey of exploration, into the fantastic art of Hieronymous Bosch, the legends of the Taino people, the life cycle of the butterfly, the myth of Leda and the Swan, the genealogy of the Zombie, the pantomime of Aladdin, the haunting ofdoppelgangers, the coming of photography, and the late fiction of Lewis Carroll.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis PDF Author: David Gallagher
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an 'ascending evolutionary scale' (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid's Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society's moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf's Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse's Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-century British Fiction

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-century British Fiction PDF Author: Jason Marc Harris
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754657668
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Arguing that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic, Jason Marc Harris demonstrates that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature. He uncovers the ideological agendas articulated using folkloric elements in works by James Barrie, William Carleton, James Hogg, Sheridan Le Fanu, George MacDonald and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, and reveals the rhetorical strategies for applying superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis PDF Author: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402026439
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
How do we perdure when we and everything around us are caught up in incessant change? But the course of this change does not seem to be haphazard and we may seek the modalities of its Logos in the transformations in which it occurs. The classic term 'Metamorphosis' focuses upon the proportions between the transformed and the retained, the principles of sameness and otherness. Applied to life and its becoming, metamorphosis pinpoints the proportions between the vital and the aesthetic significance of life. Where could this metaphysical in-between territory come better to light than in the Fine Arts? In this collection are investigated the various proportions between the vital significance of the constructivism of life and a specifically human contribution made by the creative imagination to the transformatory search for beauty and aesthetic values. Papers by: Lawrence Kimmel, Mark L. Brack, Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, William Roberts, Jadwiga Smith, Victor Gerald Rivas, Max Statkiewicz, Matti Itkonen, George R. Tibbetts, Linda Stratford, Jorella Andrews, Ingeborg M. Rocker, Stephen J. Goldberg, Leah Durner, Donnalee Dox, Catherine Schear, Samantha Henriette Krukowski, Gary Maciag, Kelly Dennis, Wanda Strukus, Magda Romanska, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Ellen Burns, Tessa Morrison, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Gary Backhaus, Daniel M. Unger, Howard Pearce.

Seductions in Narrative

Seductions in Narrative PDF Author: Gemma López
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1934043850
Category : Desire in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Seductions in Narrative is a highly original, academic study which provides a critical discourse in which desire, narrative, and subjectivity are explored. Through the critical reading of two novels by contemporary English authors, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, the book cleverly assesses the ways in which desire allows the subject to imagine an alternative, utopian location where a narrative of the self, in all its multiplicity and ambiguity, can be effected. This book is unique as general studies on these issues tend to focus on the literature produced over the nineteenth century, but not on contemporary literature. The pieces which examine desire and narrative in contemporary novels tend to do so in the work of post-colonial authors. Specific works on the production of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson also tend to focus on a somewhat close reading of their novels, but do not make use of their fiction in order to debate specific, poststructuralist issues, as this book successfully undertakes.

Swimming the Christian Atlantic

Swimming the Christian Atlantic PDF Author: Jonathan Schorsch
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004170405
Category : Christian converts
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
Drawing heavily on Inquisition sources, this book rereads the the nexus of politics, race and religion among three newly and incompletely Christianized groups in the seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic world: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians.

The Art of Mystical Narrative

The Art of Mystical Narrative PDF Author: Eitan P. Fishbane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190885475
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
In the study of Judaism, the Zohar has captivated the minds of interpreters for over seven centuries, and continues to entrance readers in contemporary times. Yet despite these centuries of study, very little attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the text, or to formal appreciation of its status as one of the great works of religious literature. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a critical approach to the zoharic story, seeking to explore the interplay between fictional discourse and mystical exegesis. Eitan Fishbane argues that the narrative must be understood first and foremost as a work of the fictional imagination, a representation of a world and reality invented by the thirteenth-century authors of the text. He claims that the text functions as a kind of dramatic literature, one in which the power of revealing mystical secrets is demonstrated and performed for the reading audience. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the Zohar and on the intersections of literary and religious studies.

Translation and Identity

Translation and Identity PDF Author: Michael Cronin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134219148
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Michael Cronin looks at how translation has played a crucial role in shaping debates about identity, language and cultural survival in the past and in the present. He explores how everything from the impact of migration on the curricula for national literature courses, to the way in which nations wage war in the modern era is bound up with urgent questions of translation and identity. Examining translation practices and experiences across continents to show how translation is an integral part of how cultures are evolving, the volume presents new perspectives on how translation can be a powerful tool in enhancing difference and promoting intercultural dialogue. Drawing on a wide range of materials from official government reports to Shakespearean drama and Hollywood films, Cronin demonstrates how translation is central to any proper understanding of how cultural identity has emerged in human history, and suggests an innovative and positive vision of how translation can be used to deal with one of the most salient issues in an increasingly borderless world.

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Ovid's Metamorphoses PDF Author: Elaine Fantham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198035060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature (Series Editors: Kathleen Coleman and Richard Rutherford) introduces individual works of Greek and Latin literature to readers who are approaching them for the first time. Each volume sets the work in its literary and historical context, and aims to offer a balanced and engaging assessment of its content, artistry, and purpose. A brief survey of the influence of the work upon subsequent generations is included to demonstrate its enduring relevance and power. All quotations from the original are translated into English. Ovid's Metamorphoses have been seen as both the culmination of and a revolution in the classical epic tradition, transferring narrative interest from war to love and fantasy. This introduction considers how Ovid found and shaped his narrative from the creation of the world to his own sophisticated times, illustrating the cruelty of jealous gods, the pathos of human love, and the imaginative fantasy of flight, monsters, magic, and illusion. Elaine Fantham introduces the reader not only to this marvelous and complex narrative poem, but to the Greek and Roman traditions behind Ovid's tales of transformation and a selection of the images and texts that it inspired.

Fairy Tale

Fairy Tale PDF Author: Marina Warner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019953215X
Category : Fairy tales
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Marina Warner guides us through the rich world of fairy tale, from Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel to Snow White and Pan's Labyrinth. Exploring pervasive themes of folklore, myth, the supernatural, imagination, and fantasy, Warner highlights the impact of the genre on human understanding, history, and culture.