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In Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, editors Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes offer an invigorating international and interdisciplinary examination of the legendary fairy Melusine. Along with fresh insights into the popular French and German traditions, these essays investigate Melusine’s English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese counterparts and explore her roots in philosophy, folklore, and classical myth. Combining approaches from art history, history, alchemy, literature, cultural studies, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster theory, this volume brings Melusine s...
In Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales editors Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo gather eleven original studies examining scenes of food and feasting in premodern outlaw texts ranging from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries and forward to their cinematic adaptations. Along with fresh insights into the popular Robin Hood legend, these essays investigate the intersections of outlawry, food studies, and feasting in Old English, Middle English, and French outlaw narratives, Anglo-Scottish border ballads, early modern ballads and dramatic works, and cinematic medievalism. The range of critical and disciplinary approaches employed, including history, literary studies, cul...
The legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are among the most beloved stories of all time. This poetry collection, the first of its kind, approaches the Arthurian world through the various lenses of its nonhuman creatures and things, presented alongside glimpses into the thoughts of some of its major characters. The poems in this book range in tone from lightly humorous to darkly meditative, and small things--cats, ants, flies, bees, an ingot in the treasury, a flower on the table, a cup, a lyre, a sword--explore big themes: relationships, mortality, gender issues, violence, and identity. These poems fracture the overarching legend, piercing its smooth veneer of unquestion...
A psychoanalytic look at the representation of monsters, giants and masculinity in medieval texts. The phenomenon of giants and giant-slaying appear in various texts from the Anglo-Saxon to late Middle English period, including Beowulf, The Knight and the Lion, History of the Kings of Britain and several of Chaucer's books.
Set against the framework of modern political concerns, Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame considers the various forms of treachery in a variety of sources, including literature, historical chronicles, and material culture creating a complex portrait of the development of this high crime.
"In Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales editors Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo gather eleven original studies examining scenes of food and feasting in premodern outlaw texts ranging from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries and forward to their cinematic adaptations. Along with fresh insights into the popular Robin Hood legend, these essays investigate the intersections of outlawry, food studies, and feasting in Old English, Middle English, and French outlaw narratives, Anglo-Scottish border ballads, early modern ballads and dramatic works, and cinematic medievalism. The range of critical and disciplinary approaches employed, including history, literary studies, cu...
Concentrating on the pictorial evidence, these papers raise many complex and varied themes related to women's creation, use and patronage of books, and the representation of women in them.
Exploring the pedagogical power of the monstrous, this collection of new essays describes innovative teaching strategies that use our cultural fascination with monsters to enhance learning in high school and college courses. The contributors discuss the implications of inviting fearsome creatures into the classroom, showing how they work to create compelling narratives and provide students a framework for analyzing history, culture, and everyday life. Essays explore ways of using the monstrous to teach literature, film, philosophy, theater, art history, religion, foreign language, and other subjects. Some sample syllabi, assignments, and class materials are provided.
This volume examines the ten most popular fictional narratives in early modern Europe between 1470 and 1800. Each of these narratives was marketed in numerous European languages and circulated throughout several centuries. Combining literary studies and book history, this work offers for the first time a transnational perspective on a selected text corpus of this genre. It explores the spatio-temporal transmission of the texts in different languages and the materiality of the editions: the narratives were bought, sold, read, translated and adapted across European borders, from the south of Spain to Iceland and from Great Britain to Poland. Thus, the study analyses the multi-faceted processes of cultural circulation, translation and adaptation of the texts. In their diverse forms of mediality such as romance, drama, ballad and penny prints, they also make a significant contribution to a European identity in the early modern period. The narrative texts examined here include Apollonius, Septem sapientum, Amadis de Gaula, Fortunatus, Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne, Melusine, Griseldis, Aesopus' Life and Fables, Reynaert de vos and Till Ulenspiegel.
Despite Disney’s carefully crafted image of family friendliness, Gothic elements are pervasive in all of Disney’s productions, ranging from its theme parks to its films and television programs. The contributors to Disney Gothic reveal that the Gothic, in fact, serves as the unacknowledged motor of the Disney machine. Exploring representations of villains, ghosts, and monsters, this book sheds important new light on the role these Gothic elements play throughout the Disney universe in constructing and reinforcing conceptions of normalcy and deviance in relation to shifting understandings of morality, social roles, and identity categories. In doing so, this book raises fascinating questions about the appeal, marketing, and consumption of Gothic horror by adults and particularly by children, who historically have been Disney’s primary audience.