Download or read book Mapping Mythologies written by Marilyn Butler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last major work by Marilyn Butler, leading literary critic of the late twentieth century, on imaginative ideas of nationhood.
Download or read book Myths on the Map written by Greta Hawes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polybius boldly declared that 'now that all places have become accessible by land or sea, it is no longer appropriate to use poets and writers of myth as witnesses of the unknown' (4.40.2). And yet, in reality, the significance of myth did not diminish as the borders of the known world expanded. Storytelling was always an inextricable part of how the ancient Greeks understood their environment; mythic maps existed alongside new, more concrete, methods of charting the contours of the earth. Specific landscape features acted as repositories of myth and spurred their retelling; myths, in turn, shaped and gave sense to natural and built environments, and were crucial to the conceptual resonances of places both unknown and known. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars of Greek myth, literature, history, and archaeology to examine the myriad intricate ways in which ancient Greek myth interacted with the physical and conceptual landscapes of antiquity. The diverse range of approaches and topics highlights in particular the plurality and pervasiveness of such interactions. The collection as a whole sheds new light on the central importance of storytelling in Greek conceptions of space.
Download or read book Maps Myths and Men written by Kirsten A. Seaver and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Vínland Map" first surfaced on the antiquarian market in 1957 and the map's authenticity has been hotly debated ever sincein controversies ranging from the anomalous composition of the ink and the map's lack of provenance to a plethora of historical and cartographical riddles. Maps, Myths, and Men is the first work to address the full range of this debate. Focusing closely on what the map in fact shows, the book contains a critique of the 1965 work The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation; scrutinizes the marketing strategies used in 1957; and covers many aspects of the map that demonstrate it is a modern fake, such as literary evidence and several scientific ink analyses performed between 1967 and 2002. The author explains a number of the riddles and provides evidence for both the identity of the mapmaker and the source of the parchment used, and she applies current knowledge of medieval Norse culture and exploration to counter widespread misinformation about Norse voyages to North America and about the Norse world picture.
Download or read book Mapping Myths of Biblical Interpretation written by Richard Walsh and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-03-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walsh explores the role that myth has played in the interpretation of the Bible. He sees myth as an empowering, structuring story used either for good or ill and either consciously or unconsciously controlling our world views. Walsh looks for both the empowerment and the marginalization effected by myth as he follows the word through its myriad meanings ('Grasping Proteus'), its use in various disciplines ('Procrustean Mythographers'), its distinctive uses in biblical interpretation ('Mything the Bible'), and, finally, the mythic character of interpretation itself ('The Myth of Interpretation'). The concluding chapter, 'Behind the Mythic Curve', muses on the difficulty of knowing the myths by which we live and reflects hopefully on the possibility of play among the myriad myths in a postmodern, pluralist world.
Download or read book The Phantom Atlas written by Edward Brooke-Hitching and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the mysteries within ancient maps — Where exploration and mythology meet This richly illustrated book collects and explores the colorful histories behind a striking range of real antique maps that are all in some way a little too good to be true. Mysteries within ancient maps: The Phantom Atlas is a guide to the world not as it is, but as it was imagined to be. It's a world of ghost islands, invisible mountain ranges, mythical civilizations, ship-wrecking beasts, and other fictitious features introduced on maps and atlases through mistakes, misunderstanding, fantasies, and outright lies. Where exploration and mythology meet: Author Edward Brooke-Hitching is a map collector, author, writer for the popular BBC Television program QI and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in a dusty heap of old maps and books in London investigating the places where exploration and mythology meet. Cartography’s greatest phantoms: The Phantom Atlas uses gorgeous atlas images as springboards for tales of deranged buccaneers, seafaring monks, heroes, swindlers, and other amazing stories behind cartography's greatest phantoms. If you are a fan of this popular genre and a reader of books such as Prisoners of Geography, Atlas of Ancient Rome, Atlas Obscura, What If, Book of General Ignorance, or Thing Explainer, your will love The Phantom Atlas
Download or read book Myth Atlas written by Thiago de Moraes and published by Blueprint Editions. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prepare to enter twelve magical, mythological worlds full of an incredible array of gods, monsters, heroes, tricksters, and fantastical beasts! This atlas of mythology shows how twelve extraordinary cultures saw the world. For some, it was a giant tree or an upside-down mountain, while others believed they were living on the back of a giant turtle! Children will be fascinated as they travel the world and discover what cultures such as the Greeks, Egyptians, Hindus, Norse, Polynesian, Aztecs, and many more believed.
Download or read book Artificial Mythologies written by Craig J. Saper and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial Mythologies was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Cultural critics teach us that myths are artificial. Cultural innovators use the artificial to make something new. In this exhilarating guide, Craig J. Saper takes us on an eye-opening tour of the process of cultural invention-willfully entertaining foolish, absurd, even fake, solutions as a way of reaching new perspectives on cultural problems. Saper deploys this method to reveal unsuspected connections among major cultural issues, such as urban decay, the dangers of television's power, family values, and conservative criticism of higher education. The model Saper uses builds on the later works of the revered French cultural critic Roland Barthes. These works, Saper argues, suggest poignant, playful, and productive ways of engaging dominant methodologies and mythologies. Artificial Mythologies shows us how, by allowing the artificial-our received ideas, common responses, and cultural mythologies-full play, we can arrive at provocative new solutions. The book demonstrates that the very conceptions of media and sociocultural issues that stymie innovation can be made to serve the cause of invention. Craig J. Saper is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Myths on the Map written by Greta Hawes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polybius boldly declared that 'now that all places have become accessible by land or sea, it is no longer appropriate to use poets and writers of myth as witnesses of the unknown' (4.40.2). And yet, in reality, the significance of myth did not diminish as the borders of the known world expanded. Storytelling was always an inextricable part of how the ancient Greeks understood their environment; mythic maps existed alongside new, more concrete, methods of charting the contours of the earth. Specific landscape features acted as repositories of myth and spurred their retelling; myths, in turn, shaped and gave sense to natural and built environments, and were crucial to the conceptual resonances of places both unknown and known. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars of Greek myth, literature, history, and archaeology to examine the myriad intricate ways in which ancient Greek myth interacted with the physical and conceptual landscapes of antiquity. The diverse range of approaches and topics highlights in particular the plurality and pervasiveness of such interactions. The collection as a whole sheds new light on the central importance of storytelling in Greek conceptions of space.
Download or read book The Origins of the World s Mythologies written by E.J. Michael Witzel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-13 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable book is the most ambitious work on mythology since that of the renowned Mircea Eliade, who all but single-handedly invented the modern study of myth and religion. Focusing on the oldest available texts, buttressed by data from archeology, comparative linguistics and human population genetics, Michael Witzel reconstructs a single original African source for our collective myths, dating back some 100,000 years. Identifying features shared by this "Out of Africa" mythology and its northern Eurasian offshoots, Witzel suggests that these common myths--recounted by the communities of the "African Eve"--are the earliest evidence of ancient spirituality. Moreover these common features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions. Witzel's book is an intellectual hand grenade that will doubtless generate considerable excitement--and consternation--in the scholarly community. Indeed, everyone interested in mythology will want to grapple with Witzel's extraordinary hypothesis about the spirituality of our common ancestors, and to understand what it tells us about our modern cultures and the way they are linked at the deepest level.
Download or read book Mythologies of the World written by Michael C. McKenzie and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at ancient myths and legends, how they are interpreted today, and what they mean now.
Download or read book American Mythologies written by William Blazek and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This challenging new book looks at the current reinvention of American Studies: a reinvention that, among other things, has put the whole issue of just what is 'American' and what is 'American Studies' into contention. The collection focuses, in particular, on American mythology. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either classical European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwa mythology and contemporary U.S. culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America. Michael K Glenday's analysis of Jayne Anne Phillips' work and explores in it the contexts where myth and dream interact with each other. Betty Louise Bell is one of four essayists in this collection who focus their criticism on authors of Native American heritage. In the first part of 'Indians with Voices', Bell carefully argues that Roy Harvey Pearce's seminal Native American studies text Savagism and Civilization fails to acknowledge its white elitist assumptions about what constitutes The American Mind and views Native Americans along a primitive-savage binary that helped to create a twentieth-century 'national mythos of innocence and destiny'. Other essays include Christopher Brookeman's study of the impact of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer's non-fiction writing about heavyweight boxing.
Download or read book New Mythologies in Design and Culture written by Rebecca Houze and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as its point of departure Roland Barthes' classic series of essays, Mythologies, Rebecca Houze presents an exploration of signs and symbols in the visual landscape of postmodernity. In nine chapters Houze considers a range of contemporary phenomena, from the history of sustainability to the meaning of sports and children's building toys. Among the ubiquitous global trademarks she examines are BP, McDonald's, and Nike. What do these icons say to us today? What political and ideological messages are hidden beneath their surfaces? Taking the idea of myth in its broadest sense, the individual case studies employ a variety of analytic methods derived from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, and art history. In their eclecticism of approach they demonstrate the interdisciplinarity of design history and design studies. Just as Barthes' meditations on culture concentrated on his native France, New Mythologies is rooted in the author's experience of living and teaching in the United States. Houze's reflections encompass both contemporary American popular culture and the history of American industry, with reference to such foundational figures as Thomas Jefferson and Walt Disney. The collection provides a point of entry into today's complex postmodern or post-postmodern world, and suggests some ways of thinking about its meanings, and the lessons we might learn from it.
Download or read book Inscriptions of Nature written by Pratik Chakrabarti and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award for an Outstanding Book in the History of Science by the History of Science Society In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.
Download or read book Handbook of Chinese Mythology written by Lihui Yang and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled from ancient and scattered texts and based on groundbreaking new research, Handbook of Chinese Mythology is the most comprehensive English-language work on the subject ever written from an exclusively Chinese perspective. This work focuses on the Han Chinese people but ranges across the full spectrum of ancient and modern China, showing how key myths endured and evolved over time. A quick reference section covers all major deities, spirits, and demigods, as well as important places, mythical animals and plants, and related items.
Download or read book Psychoanalytic Mythologies written by Ian Parker and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Psychoanalytic Mythologies’ presents a collection of essays on the theme of what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic imagery. The author disturbs the strongly-held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true, and this thesis forms the recurrent motif that binds these essays together. Instead he argues that psychoanalysis functions as something that is only ever locally true. These arguments are elaborated upon in a range of contexts, from night clubs, garages and trains to theme parks, magic circles and yoga, and the different strands are distilled into a cohesive thesis in the definitive final essay ‘Psychoanalytic Myth Today’. The essays presented here were initially published in scattered newsletters and journals, and were written intermittently in a period stretching back over ten years. Ian Parker has written widely in this area, and these lively and innovative essays taken together form a searing manifesto against the accepted dogmas of psychoanalysis.
Download or read book A Companion to Greek Mythology written by Ken Dowden and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Greek Mythology presents a series of essays that explore the phenomenon of Greek myth from its origins in shared Indo-European story patterns and the Greeks’ contacts with their Eastern Mediterranean neighbours through its development as a shared language and thought-system for the Greco-Roman world. Features essays from a prestigious international team of literary experts Includes coverage of Greek myth’s intersection with history, philosophy and religion Introduces readers to topics in mythology that are often inaccessible to non-specialists Addresses the Hellenistic and Roman periods as well as Archaic and Classical Greece
Download or read book Coral and Concrete written by Greg Dvorak and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coral and Concrete, Greg Dvorak’s cross-cultural history of Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, explores intersections of environment, identity, empire, and memory in the largest inhabited coral atoll on earth. Approaching the multiple “atollscapes” of Kwajalein’s past and present as Marshallese ancestral land, Japanese colonial outpost, Pacific War battlefield, American weapons-testing base, and an enduring home for many, Dvorak delves into personal narratives and collective mythologies from contradictory vantage points. He navigates the tensions between “little stories” of ordinary human actors and “big stories” of global politics—drawing upon the “little” metaphor of the coral organisms that colonize and build atolls, and the “big” metaphor of the all-encompassing concrete that buries and co-opts the past. Building upon the growing body of literature about militarism and decolonization in Oceania, this book advocates a layered, nuanced approach that emphasizes the multiplicity and contradictions of Pacific Islands histories as an antidote to American hegemony and globalization within and beyond the region. It also brings Japanese, Korean, Okinawan, and American perspectives into conversation with Micronesians’ recollections of colonialism and war. This transnational history—built upon a combination of reflective personal narrative, ethnography, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies—thus resituates Kwajalein Atoll as a pivotal site where Islanders have not only thrived for thousands of years, but also mediated between East and West, shaping crucial world events. Based on multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, as well as Dvorak’s own experiences growing up between Kwajalein, the United States, and Japan, Coral and Concrete integrates narrative and imagery with semiotic analysis of photographs, maps, films, and music, traversing colonial tropical fantasies, tales of victory and defeat, missile testing, fisheries, war-bereavement rituals, and landowner resistance movements, from the twentieth century through the present day. Representing history as a perennial struggle between coral and concrete, the book offers an Oceanian paradigm for decolonization, resistance, solidarity, and optimism that should appeal to all readers far beyond the Marshall Islands.
