"This book details magic's generally maleficent effect on human beings from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. Bottigheimer shows that certain magical motifs lived on from age to age, but that …
Retells the stories of Greek gods and heroes.
Contains sixty-six Greek legends of gods and heroes.
Using a cultural approach to classical myths, this book examines how they affect psychoanalytic theory, historical experience, elite culture, popular culture, and everyday life. Berger explores diverse topics such as the Oedipus Myth, James Bond, Star Wars, and fairy tales.
""I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions-much good it did me." So begins Kaikeyi's tale. The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, she is raised on grand stories about the might and benevolence of the gods: how they churned vast…
The Representation of External Time -- The Management of Narrative Time: Duration -- The Management of Narrative Time: Order -- The Voice of the Silent Narrator -- Withheld Knowledge -- Conclusion. "Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th or 14th cent…
"Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th or 14th centuries, the Icelandic Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue examines the singular textual voice of the Sagas while also exploring their important underlyin…
Kevin Crossley-Holland uses his skills as a poet, translator and author to bring the Norse myths alive, revealing a dynamic culture in which is reflected the Norseman's spirit and confidence, his ruthlessness and cruelty, arrogance and generosity.
"From Asgard to Valhalla is the first book to show how and why the Norse myths have so powerfully resonated from era to era: from the Viking-age stories of ice and fire to the epic poetry of Beowulf: from the twilight of the gods in Wagner's Gotterdammerung to Marvel Comics' Mig…
"The Norman Conquest is one of the most momentous events in English history and its consequences changed England forever. Indeed, the Battle of Hastings and its aftermath nearly wiped out the leading families of Anglo-Saxon England - so what happened to the children this conflic…
This bilingual work aims to identify and explain the subversive rewriting of ancient, medieval and modern myths in contemporary novels. The book opens with two theoretical essays on the subject of subversive tendencies and myth reinvention in the contemporary novel. From there, …
1. Introduction -- 2. The New Age of Greek Religiosity: Orthodox Christianity and Beyond -- 3. Matiasma : the Energetic Interplay of Senses and Emotions -- 4. Ksematiasma : Healing, Power, Performance -- 5. Creative Syntheses through Material Culture: the Evil Eye in the Spiritu…
"This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalizati…
"Today, werewolves are primarily known through films: as humans who change into wolves under the influence of the full moon. Although this is a recent image, werewolves have a long, fragmented and discontinuous history. Werewolf Histories is the first academic book in English to…
In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of…
The history of science provides numerous examples of the way in which imagination, religion and mythology have sometimes helped and sometimes hindered scientific progress. While established ideas and beliefs clearly held back the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin, th…
Myths have long been considered the prime linkage between nature and culture, but we hold that they are more than this. The mythogene, which is our conceptualization of a connecting structure, links subject and object, history and transcendence, but above all is the blueprint fo…
