Folklore Publishing
Livres Canada Books
View Rights PortalIn the Western cultural production that puts individual or collective fear at its center, East/Central Europe has been portrayed as an othered space of horror - lawless, frightening zones where anything can happen. Incorporating articles on literature, film, visual arts, video games, music videos, and music festivals, Contemporary Slavic horror across media: Cursed zones is a pioneering anthology of academic essays devoted to Slavic horror fiction. The book focuses on works from the mid-20th century through the present, particularly the post-Soviet period. Assessing current trends in Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and East/Central European horror media, the book looks at similarities and idiosyncrasies of the genre in its Slavic variant. With this anthology we hope to tame 'the Easterner Other' and start exorcising 'monstrous' East/Central Europe.
The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg has long been recognised as one of the most important sources for the history of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, especially for the history of the Ottonian Empire. Thietmar's testimony also has special value because of his geographical location, in eastern Saxony, on the boundary between German and Slavic cultures. He is arguably the single most important witness to the early history of Poland, and his detailed descriptions of Slavic folklore are the earliest on record. This is a very important source in the medieval period, translated here in its entirety for the first time. It relates to an area of medieval studies generally dominated by German scholars, in which Anglo-phone scholars are beginning to make a substantial contribution.
A gripping guide to the weird yet everyday world of British folklore. In this ground-breaking book, two leading experts provide the definitive guide to British folklore past and present. Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook explore folklore in all its remarkable variations, from village rituals and fairy tales to UFO legends and internet fanfiction. Travelling through a landscape of witches, wizards and wicker men, they reveal how folklore has been researched and written about in the past and show how it continues to be lived in the present. At the same time, they provide the reader with a valuable toolkit for understanding how to interpret the diverse examples given. The book's key message is that folklore is much more than the fossilised remains of a distant, rural past. Folklore is and always has been ubiquitous, dynamic and political. It is a living tradition that draws from many sources, including migrant communities, and is forever being renewed and updated.
A celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before. Queer as folklore travels across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new. Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward takes you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul's Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the 'queerly departed' along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows and created safe spaces in underworlds. But these forgotten narratives tell stories of resilience that deserve to be heard. Join any Pride march and you will see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads, drag queens in mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. These are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots. To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past.
Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.
The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg has long been recognised as one of the most important sources for the history of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, especially for the history of the Ottonian Empire. Thietmar's testimony also has special value because of his geographical location, in eastern Saxony, on the boundary between German and Slavic cultures. He is arguably the single most important witness to the early history of Poland, and his detailed descriptions of Slavic folklore are the earliest on record. This is a very important source in the medieval period, translated here in its entirety for the first time. It relates to an area of medieval studies generally dominated by German scholars, in which Anglo-phone scholars are beginning to make a substantial contribution. ;
The macabre tale of an eighteenth-century woman immortalised in folklore as the 'Manchester Mummy'. In 1835, the Manchester Natural History Society opened the doors of its museum. Taking pride of place in its collection were three mummies: one was Egyptian, one was Peruvian and one was a woman from Cheetham Hill. This is the first time the true story of Hannah Beswick, the so-called 'Manchester Mummy', has been told. Over the years, explanations for the Manchester Mummy have ranged from the chilling - Hannah's fear of being buried alive - to the downright bizarre - the legend of her buried gold - but the truth is more complex. Exploring this fascinating episode from museum history, Unburied sheds light on the Victorian turn to the macabre and changing attitudes to the display of human remains. It debunks the legends and asks what Hannah Beswick can tell us about death and dying, mummies and museums.
The five Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden - frequently attract attention as examples of a 'Nordic model'. The meanings of the term vary, but especially since the global financial crisis of 2008-9 the Nordic countries have often been portrayed positively, as examples of economic dynamism, innovation and social equality. Studies of these images of the Nordic countries and Nordic region and their international circulations are now a well-established field of research. This volume explores how the Nordic model has been shaped by global entanglements, in exchange not only with Western Europe and North America, but also with the Global South. Drawing on selected case studies, the volume offers new perspectives on the meanings of the Nordic model and Nordic exceptionalism in a global context during the half century since c. 1970.
The 12th revised and updated version of the History of the German language – long regarded as an indispensable standard work for German Studies, has just been published. From now on, this comprehensive textbook on the history of the language is divided into two volumes. In addition to introducing questions about historical linguistics, the first volume provides a detailed account of the prehistory and history of German right up to the present day. Based on extensive source analyses, the focus is on aspects of culture and social history; only the chapters on the Indo-Germanic and Germanic language include key information about structural history. The second part contains concise, but readily understandable accounts of Old, Middle and Early New High German in terms of phonology, graphemics, morphology and syntax. Not only are synchronous descriptions given of the particular language period, but also the development of German language construction at all structural levels is explained. The association of grammatical synchrony and structural diachrony is a particular characteristic of this second part of Schmidt’s work on the history of language.
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
In the pharmacy, the staff communicate with customers, colleagues, the medical profession, sales representatives and nursing home staff. Pharmacy employees produce written information based on well-chosen sources and represent the pharmacy to the outside world through presentations, on social media, or with the help of flyers, posters and other promotional materials. All this presupposes the confident use of language, and is best trained in advance. Part A of this work provides assistance for the most diverse communicative requirements in the pharmacy. A short theoretical explanation is always followed by several tasks so that you can immediately put what you have learned into practice and try it out. The „Brief overview of grammar and language knowledge“ boxes point out linguistic stumbling blocks. Those who are not yet sure of the technical terms can make themselves fit in Part B. Here one learns how to conduct a good counselling interview according to the BAC guideline. Extensive lists of technical terms and their explanations suitable for everyday use – all arranged according to organ systems – contain the most important vocabulary for everyday pharmacy work. A totally practical German lesson!
The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.
With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period's most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold. This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play's performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play.
This work details traces the origins, development and impact of the proselytizing organization, the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, from its Protestant foundation during the famine of 1845-47 to the early decades of Irish Free State. It argues that the foundation of this ostensibly religious society was also underpinned by social, political, and economic factors and demonstrates that by the mid 1850s the mission operated on a very substantial scale. Moffitt examines the mission's role in the shifting political realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The impact of this inter-faith power struggle and its legacy to the present day are explored by examining contemporary sources, folklore evidence, and the depiction of proselytizing missions in both Catholic and Protestant denomination literature and fictional writings. ;
This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.
This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.
How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans' relationship to the environment.