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The works of J.R.R. Tolkien have not only redefined a genre of literature but also had a far-reaching impact on culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tolkien's name has joined the ranks of authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoevsky, Donne, and Dickens who make us think differently about the world. In Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology, an international group of scholars consider what Tolkien's works (and Jackson's film interpretations) can teach us about living out our theology in the world. From essays on Tolkien's insights into community, what we can learn about our spiritual senses from encounters with the Nazgûl, the pastoral wisdom of Treebeard, to the theological value of food—including second breakfasts—we invite you to journey with us through Middle-earth as we engage the applicability of Tolkien's works for theology and our world.

Eine kulturwissenschaftlich fundierte Darstellung des brisanten Themas in Text- und Bilddokumenten von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Moderne. Es ist ein im kollektiven Gedächtnis fest verankerter Mythos: das Los des Ahasver, des Ewigen Juden, von dem erzählt wird, dass er dem auf dem Kreuzweg schmachtenden Christus die Rast missgönnt habe und dafür zu ewiger Wanderschaft verdammt worden sei. Die Wurzeln der Überlieferung reichen bis ins Mittelalter zurück, doch erst zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts beginnt der Stoff sein hohes Wirkungspotential zu entfalten. Ahasver wird zu einer plastischen und zugleich mirakulösen Figur, die ihren Siegeszug quer durch Europa antritt. Ein antijudaistischer Ton ist dabei nicht zu verkennen. Und auch wenn im Laufe der Zeit identifikatorische Formen der Aneignung den Mythos durchdringen, bleibt doch die Gefahr judenfeindlicher Aktualisierung präsent, wie nicht zuletzt die NS-Propaganda zeigt. Das Buch verfolgt die ebenso erstaunliche wie ungeheure Karriere dieser Figur von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Moderne, wobei das Augenmerk vor allem den brisanten Dokumenten des deutschen Kulturraums gilt. Ob Goethe, Heine, Wagner oder Celan – sie alle sind Stimmen eines Chors, der gerade in seiner Dissonanz bezeugt, dass Mythos und Protagonist das Schicksal teilen, nicht sterben zu können.

With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.

La première partie met en évidence les relations entre le mythe et la société et montre comment les représentations mythiques influencent notre perception du monde, gouvernent nos idéologies et déterminent nos rapports sociaux. La seconde partie traite du réinvestissement de la matière mythique issue de la tradition orale dans la littérature écrite. Cet ouvrage démontre bien que le mythe est une lecture du monde et de l'existence humaine, à la fois quête génésique et éclairage contemporain.

Per tutta la sua breve ma intensissima vita, Leopardi non smise mai di pensare al mito, concependolo non soltanto come un modo di manifestarsi della sapienza antica, appartenente all'infanzia del mondo e innervante il procedere epocale della storia umana (come pensava ad esempio Gian Battista Vico), né solo come una semplice espressione della soggettività volta a esorcizzare il terribile della natura, ma piuttosto come una modalità ontologica di darsi delle cose stesse, potendo sopravvivere solo in un paesaggio in penombra, non abbagliato da alcuna illuminazione diretta. Dopo aver tracciato per linee essenziali il dibattito su mito e mitologia nell'Europa del xviii secolo, l'autore avanza una nuova lettura dell'Infinito, collocando questo capolavoro assoluto della letteratura universale all'interno di un duplice contesto: quello della formazione poetica e filosofica di Leopardi e quello dell'epoca romantica italiana ed europea in cui il poeta visse. Se nella modernità i fenomeni sono diventati oggetto di studio delle scienze della natura, perdendo così la loro vitalità irriducibile al concetto, il sentire persuaso degli antichi non potrà più essere riproposto per evocare l'apparire delle cose nella forma di figure mitologiche non più credibili, come i fauni o le ninfe, Dafne o Procne ecc. Mentre nel corso del xix secolo sta avviandosi al tramonto la grande stagione del sublime riesumata dalla tarda antichità, Leopardi – attingendo alle radici più profonde dell'Umanesimo italiano – pensa la sopravvivenza del mito nella rappresentazione di quella sottile linea impalpabile, ma intensamente viva – «il celeste confine» divenuto poi «l'ultimo orizzonte» – che separa e unisce il visibile e l'invisibile, per evocare l'irrappresentabile proprio dell'arte e del pensiero moderni.

Das Interesse am Mythos ist aus der europäischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte nicht wegzudenken. Es hat seinen Niederschlag in einer beinahe unüberschaubaren Vielzahl wissenschaftlicher Mythostheorien sowie in einer vielgestaltigen literarischen und künstlerischen Mythenrezeption gefunden. Dass dieses Interesse dabei nicht zuletzt dem Mythos als Zeugnis des Fremden gilt, ist die zentrale These der Studie. Mit dem neu eingeführten Begriff der mythologischen Alterität soll in diesem Sinne eine – bislang in ihrer Bedeutung sowie in ihrer Produktivität unterschätzte – Konstante im neuzeitlichen Mythosverständnis bzw. eine Gemeinsamkeit verschiedener Mythosauffassungen in den Fokus gerückt werden. So wird zum einen gezeigt, dass zahlreiche Theorien des Mythos (von Giambattista Vico und David Hume bis zu René Girard und Hans Blumenberg) ihre Gegenstände als Zeugnisse des kulturell oder auch des radikal Fremden beschreiben und interpretieren. Zum anderen wird anhand verschiedenartiger Beispiele aus der englischen Literatur vom 19. bis zum frühen 21. Jahrhundert erläutert, inwiefern auch in der literarischen Mythenrezeption das Fremde bzw. Differenzen von Eigenem und Fremdem thematisch und formal virulent werden.

Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters—doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations—bodily metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868–1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of “stigmatized others”—figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity, informed by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body, and that they can be read as being complicit in the ideologies of the empire, for they are uncanny bodies that ignite a sense of terror by blurring the binary of “normal” and “abnormal” that modern sciences like eugenics and psychology created. Reading these literary bodies against the historical rise of the Japanese empire and its colonial wars in Asia, Nakamura argues that they must be understood in relation to the most “monstrous” body of all in modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.

In this groundbreaking work of revisionary literary history, Marilyn Butler traces the imagining of alternative versions of the nation in eighteenth-century Britain, both in the works of a series of well-known poets (Akenside, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, Blake) and in the differing accounts of the national culture offered by eighteenth-century antiquarians and literary historians. She charts the beginnings in eighteenth-century Britain of what is now called cultural history, exploring how and why it developed, and the issues at stake. Her interest is not simply in a succession of great writers, but in the politics of a wider culture, in which writers, scholars, publishers, editors, booksellers, readers all play their parts. For more than thirty years, Marilyn Butler was a towering presence in eighteenth-century and romantic studies, and this major work is published for the first time.

Myth is oral, collective, sacred, and timeless. Fantasy is a modern literary mode and a popular entertainment. Yet the two have always been inextricably intertwined. Stories about Stories examines fantasy as an arena in which different ways of understanding myth compete and new relationships with myth are worked out. The book offers a comprehensive history of the modern fantastic as well as an argument about its nature and importance. Specific chapters cover the origins of fantasy in the Romantic search for localized myths, fantasy versions of the Modernist turn toward the primitive, the post-Tolkienian exploration of world mythologies, post-colonial reactions to the exploitation of indigenous sacred narratives by Western writers, fantasies based in Christian belief alongside fundamentalist attempts to stamp out the form, and the emergence of ever-more sophisticated structures such as metafiction through which to explore mythic constructions of reality.

A variety of thinkers used the concept of myth to articulate their anxieties about modernity. By telling the story of mythic thinking in Britain from its origins in Victorian social anthropology to its postwar cultural mainstreaming, this book reveals a yearning for transcendence in an age long assumed to be disenchanted.

Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity explores how the mythical and mystical past informs national imaginations. Building on notions of invented tradition and myths of the nation, it looks at the power of narrative and fiction to shape identity, with particular reference to the British and Celtic contexts. The authors consider how aspects of the past are reinterpreted or reimagined in a variety of ways to give coherence to desired national groupings, or groups aspiring to nationhood and its ‘defence'. The coverage is unusually broad in its historical sweep, dealing with work from prehistory to the contemporary, with a particular emphasis on the period from the eighteenth century to the present. The subject matter includes notions of ancient deities, Druids, Celticity, the archaeological remains of pagan religions, traditional folk tales, racial and religious myths and ethnic politics, and the different types of returns and hauntings that can recycle these ideas in culture. Innovative and interdisciplinary, the scholarship in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity is mainly literary but also geographical and historical and draws on religious studies, politics and the social sciences. Thus the collection offers a stimulatingly broad number of new viewpoints on a matter of great topical relevance: national identity and the politicization of its myths.

Die Studie Textus – Contextus – Circumtextus widmet sich dem Mythos sowohl als philosophischem, wie auch als literaturwissenschaftlich operationalem Phänomen. Mittels der Methode der Texthermeneutik wird so unter anderem der Frage nachgegangen, welche Konsequenzen sich aus der Verortung eines mythopoetisches Werkes im weit verzweigten Gefüge thematisch konvergierender Texte für den Mythos, darüber hinaus jedoch auch für die Geschichtsschreibung ergeben. Entgegen poststrukturalistischer und dekonstruktivistischer Ansätzen wird hier der Mythos selbst als Methode etabliert und somit zur ästhetischen, aber auch kulturhistorisch relevanten Totalität. Entlang der Analysen von James Joyces'Ulysses, der Aristotelischen Poetik und des Spätwerks Paul Ricœurs wird so die Entwicklung einer Theorie des Mythos vorangetrieben, die den Mythos zu einer Vermittlungsinstanz der besonderen Art macht und von der'traditional tale'zu einem narratologischen Sonderfall erhebt.

Archetypal symbols in ancient myths as well as the folktales, nursery stories, and fairytales of the Middle Ages are the blueprints of modern fantasy literature. This book explores the modern dreamscape of present-day fantasy, using the ancient myths and traditional fairytales as guides and shining the light of psychological insight onto every symbolic figure and theme encountered. Chapters are dedicated to all of the significant archetypes: heroes and princesses, fairy godmothers and evil witches, wizards and dark lords, magic, and magical beasts are all explored. The analyses and interpretations are informed by classic psychoanalytic studies; the works of fantasy literature examined in this book include the most popular and influential in the genre.

'Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.'Addressed to Frodo as he prepared to travel from Lothlórien to Mordor to destroy the One Ring, the prophetic words of Galadriel in the film The Fellowship of the Ring are just as pertinent to J R R Tolkien's own fiction. For decades, hobbits, elves, dwarves, dragons and the other fantastical creatures of Middle-earth have captured the imaginations of a fiercely loyal tribe of readers, all enhanced by the immense success of Peter Jackson's films: first The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now his new The Hobbit. But for all Tolkien's global fame and the familiarity of modern culture with Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo and Sam, the sources of the great mythmaker's own mythmaking have been neglected. Mark Atherton here explores the chief influences on The Hobbit: Tolkien's boyhood in the West Midlands; the landscapes and seascapes which shaped hismythologies; his formative experiences in the First World War; his studies in Norse mythology and medieval English literature; his love of language and dialect, and proverb and saying; his literary friendships, especially with C S Lewis and the Oxford-based Inklings; and the relevance of his themes, especially ecological themes, to the present-day.There and Back Again offers a unique guide to the varied inspirations behind Tolkien's life and work, and sheds new light on how a legend is born. Essential reading for all those who love and admire the rich and complex topographies of Middle-earth, the book will also have great appeal to students of literature, history and myth. It is the first to show in depth from where Tolkien drew creativity, and how these myriad resources inspired him to craft the mostremarkable fantasy novels ever written, densely packed with fauna from another world.

Robert Graves tells us that “the poet's first enrichment is a knowledge and understanding of myths.” Certainly, as this collection of essays, poems and visual images affirms, mythology has been a field richly mined by poets and artists from antiquity through to the present day. It is testament to both the enduring power of myth, as well as the adaptability of its form, that poets and writers continually turn to the mythic for both inspiration and guidance. This volume presents a diverse collection of analytical and creative works by scholars, poets and visual artists, in response to their varied explorations of the prolific dialogue that exists between myth and poetry.

This book develops a theory of a Caribbean-Atlantic imaginary by exploring the ways two colonial texts represent the consciousnesses of Amerindians, Africans, and Europeans at two crucial points marking respectively the origins and demise of slavocratic systems in the West Indies. Focusing on Richard Ligon's History of Barbados (1657) and Matthew ‘Monk'Lewis'Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), the study identifies specific myths and belief systems surrounding sugar and obeah as each of these came to stand for concepts of order and counterorder, and to figure the material and symbolic power of masters and slaves respectively. Rooting the imaginary in indigenous Caribbean myths, the study adopts the pre-Columbian origins of the imaginary ascribed by Wilson Harris to a cross cultural bridge or arc, and derives the mythic origins for the centrality of sugar in the imaginary's constitution from Kamau Brathwaite. The book's central organizing principle is an oppositional one, grounded on the order/counterorder binary model of the imaginary formulated by the philosopher-social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. The study breaks new ground by reading Ligon's History and Lewis'Journal through the lens of the slaves'imaginaries of hidden knowledge. By redefining Lewis'subjectivity through his poem's most potent counterordering symbol, the demon-king, this book advances recent scholarly interest in Jamaica's legendary Three Fingered Jack.

In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their'powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men,'thrilled readers and audiences—and simultaneously embodied a host of our dreams and fears about modern life and the onrushing future. But that's just scratching the surface, says Jeffrey Kripal. In Mutants and Mystics, Kripal offers a brilliantly insightful account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science. Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby's cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick's futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore's sex magic and Whitley Strieber's communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives. Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions. Moving deftly from Cold War science and Fredric Wertham's anticomics crusade to gnostic revelation and alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and shot through with an awareness that there are other realities far beyond our everyday understanding. A bravura performance, beautifully illustrated in full color throughout and brimming over with incredible personal stories, Mutants and Mystics is that rarest of things: a book that is guaranteed to broaden—and maybe even blow—your mind.

This volume develops recent critical work on myth, as well as alluding to seminal if superseded works in the field. The collection explores ways in which this dynamic mythmaking process has taken place — and continues to take place — in contemporary art and thought.

What are myths and what are they for? Myths are stories that both tell us how to live and remind us of the inescapability and pull of the collective past. The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity explores the continuing power of primal stories to inhabit our thinking. An international range of contributors examine a range of texts and figures from the Bible to Cormac McCarthy and from Thor to the Virgin Mary to focus on the way that ancient stories both give access to the unconscious and offer individuals and communities personae or masks. Myths translated and recreated become, in this sense, very public acts about very private thoughts and feelings. The subtitle of the book, ‘Innovation, Singularity and Alterity,'reflects the way in which the history of cultures in all genres is a history of innovation, of a search for new modes of expression which, paradoxically, often entails recourse to myth precisely because it offers narratives of singularity and otherness which may be readily appropriated. The individual contributors offer testament to the continuing significance of myth through its own constant metamorphosis, as it both reflects and transforms the societies in which it is (re)produced.

Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge von namhaften europäischen und amerikanischen Gelehrten auf dem Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften und der Religionswissenschaften, die einen repräsentativen Querschnitt der zeitgenössischen Erforschung des Mythos, seiner Erscheinungsformen und seiner Transformationen in Griechenland, Rom und im Vorderen Orient von der Antike bis heute Epochen darbieten.

2009 — Runner-up, Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature examines a broad array of texts that have contributed to the formation of an indigenous strand of Chicano cultural politics. In particular, this book exposes the ethnographic and poetic discourses that shaped the aesthetics and stylistics of Chicano nationalism and Chicana feminism. Contreras offers original perspectives on writers ranging from Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa to Lorna Dee Cervantes and Alma Luz Villanueva, effectively marking the invocation of a Chicano indigeneity whose foundations and formulations can be linked to U.S. and British modernist writing. By highlighting intertextualities such as those between Anzaldúa and D. H. Lawrence, Contreras critiques the resilience of primitivism in the Mexican borderlands. She questions established cultural perspectives on'the native,'which paradoxically challenge and reaffirm racialized representations of Indians in the Americas. In doing so, Blood Lines brings a new understanding to the contradictory and richly textured literary relationship that links the projects of European modernism and Anglo-American authors, on the one hand, and the imaginary of the post-revolutionary Mexican state and Chicano/a writers, on the other hand.

This critical biography traces the spiritual, psychological, and intellectual growth of one of America's foremost oracles and prophets, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Beginning with his undergraduate career at Harvard and spanning the range of his adult life, the book examines the complex, often painful emotional journey inward that would eventually transform Emerson from an average Unitarian minister into one of the century's most formidable intellectual figures. By connecting Emerson's inner life with his outer life, Len Gougeon illustrates a virtually seamless relationship between Emerson's Transcendental philosophy and his later career as a social reformer, a rebel who sought to'unsettle all things'in an effort to redeem his society.In tracing the path of Emerson's evolution, Gougeon makes use of insights by Joseph Campbell, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, and N. O. Brown. Like Emerson, all of these thinkers directly experienced the fragmentation and dehumanization of the Western world, and all were influenced both directly and indirectly by Emerson and his philosophy. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how Emerson's philosophy would become a major force of liberal reformation in American society, a force whose impact is still felt today.

Märchen oder Mythos? Worin liegt der Unterschied? Die Autorin untersucht Texte von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, z. B. Kafka und Benjamin, und grenzt Märchen und Mythos als zwei verschiedene Erzählmöglichkeiten voneinander ab. Eine wichtige Studie für Komparatistik, Literaturgeschichte und Altphilologie.

The closely entwined histories of Portugal and Brazil remain key references for understanding developments—past and present—in either country. Accordingly, Fernando Arenas considers Portugal and Brazil in relation to one another in this exploration of changing definitions of nationhood, subjectivity, and utopias in both cultures. Examining the two nations's shared language and histories as well as their cultural, social, and political points of divergence, Arenas pursues these definitive changes through the realms of literature, intellectual thought, popular culture, and political discourse. Both Brazil and Portugal are subject to the economic, political, and cultural forces of postmodern globalization. Arenas analyzes responses to these trends in contemporary writers including José Saramago, Caio Fernando Abreu, Maria Isabel Barreno, Vergílio Ferreira, Clarice Lispector, and Maria Gabriela Llansol. Ultimately, Utopias of Otherness shows how these writers have redefined the concept of nationhood, not only through their investment in utopian or emancipatory causes such as Marxist revolution, women's liberation, or sexual revolution, but also by shifting their attention to alternative modes of conceiving the ethical and political realms.