Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth offers nineteen new critical essays from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examining the cultural, literary, and mythical inheritance of the legendary half-fairy, half-serpent Melusine.
Following his father’s death, Adam Delaney has acquired his father’s title as Earl of Delaney and married Anne, who has given birth to their twin sons, Lance and Tristan. Now Adam and Anne have taken a much-needed vacation in France, leaving their sons at Delaney Castle with Adam’s mother and grandmother and Anne’s father. But what begins as a pleasant and long overdue honeymoon soon becomes another strange mythical adventure when Anne reunites with her old friend, Morgan, while the couple is visiting Lusignan, home to the legendary fairy Melusine. Before Anne knows it, she finds herself listening to stories within stories about the fairy Melusine and the magical rings she left to her children, magical rings that are tied to Adam and Anne’s future in ways they can scarcely imagine. Melusine’s Gift is the second of five books in Tyler R. Tichelaar’s Children of Arthur series following Arthur’s Legacy.
Considerable interest in faery tradition has grown up in recent years and not least in the story of Melusine of Lusignan, the subject of a prose romance by Jean d'Arras at the end of the 14th century, swiftly followed by one in verse by Couldrette. This book provides a collection of material from various sources to give an all round picture of the remarkable faery, her town, her church, her immediate family, and the great Lusignan dynasty she founded. An established authority on Melusine, Gareth Knight collects together all the best source material, which he translates from the French, and presents his own researches into the Lusignan family of the 12th century, whose dynasty included kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, examining the possibility of a familiar spirit guiding the family in its destiny.
Unlock the Mysteries of Faery Enter the world of Faery and meet its diverse inhabitants, including pixies, will o' the wisps, the Sidhe, and more. This enchanting book delves into their folklore and history as well as a variety of techniques for developing relationships with them. Emily Carding shares nearly two dozen voice- and movement-based exercises for all levels of ability, such as using a symbol as a gateway to Faery and taking an underworld journey to meet your Faery ally. You'll also discover how to honor faeries, connect deeply to nature, and uncover your unique gifts. Featuring numerous color illustrations by bestselling artist Siolo Thompson, this guide immerses you in Faery magic and shows you how to strengthen connections between our worlds.
Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.
During the revolutionary turbulence of 17th century France robbers brutally clubbed and stripped a young sailor, then left him unconscious to die in the cold fields of a beleaguered farming community. At the precipice of nonexistence, a nearly invisible mysterious being intervened by sending what appeared to be little flying sparks to his aid. These agents halted his external and internal bleeding and help him to begin healing. Thus begins the first contact between alien antd human. Vincent lives, but not until he finds himself abandoned on an uncharted island does he learn who saved him, and why. The alien seeks a sacred covenant wit him and his people. A seemingly all-powerful being offers a thousand additional years of life—for a price.
In their new monograph, Gender and Short Fiction: Women's Tales in Contemporary Britain, Jorge Sacido-Romero and Laura M Lojo-Rodriguez explain why artistically ambitious women writers continue turning to the short story, a genre that has not yet attained the degree of literary prestige and social recognition the novel has had in the modern period. In this timely volume, the editors endorse the view that the genre still retains its potential as a vehicle for the expression of female experience alternative to and/or critical with dominant patriarchal ideology present at the very onset of the development of the modern British short story at the turn of the nineteenth century.
"The articles that appear in this collection were presented as papers at the Cambridge Annual French Graduate Conference held at King's College, Cambridge in April 2008"--P. [xi].
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.
Research on medieval and early modern travel literature has made great progress, which now allows us to take the next step and to analyze the correlations between the individual and space throughout time, which contributed essentially to identity formation in many different settings. The contributors to this volume engage with a variety of pre-modern texts, images, and other documents related to travel and the individual's self-orientation in foreign lands and make an effort to determine the concept of identity within a spatial framework often determined by the meeting of various cultures. Moreover, objects, images and words can also travel and connect people from different worlds through books. The volume thus brings together new scholarship focused on the interrelationship of travel, space, time, and individuality, which also includes, of course, women's movement through the larger world, whether in concrete terms or through proxy travel via readings. Travel here is also examined with respect to craftsmen's activities at various sites, artists' employment for many different projects all over Europe and elsewhere, and in terms of metaphysical experiences (catabasis).