Article

Vampire Evolution

January 2003

January 2003

Authors:

Jøn, A. Asbjørn 2003, 'Vampire Evolution', mETAphor, vol. 2003, no. 3, pp. 19-23. Examining the way that shifting images of vampires within texts have been shaped this article explores the ways that vampire imagery could be analysed to meet the needs of the (secondary level) Higher School Certificate English course in Australia. It examines a range of important folklore figures (including Lilith and Arnold Paole), significant vampire fiction authors (such as: Polidori, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Nancy A. Collins and Sheridan LeFanu), important visual texts (such as: Blade, Kindred: The Embraced and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and the way vampires function in role-playing games (like Dungeons & Dragons and Vampire: the Masquerade). Metaphor is the journal of the English Teachers Association of New South Wales, Australia.

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Mother Earth: An American Story

June 1989 · Ethnohistory

Sam D Gill

"The earth is my mother, and on her bosom I shall repose." Attributed to Tecumseh in the early 1800s, this statement is frequently cited to uphold the view, long and widely proclaimed in scholarly and popular literature, that Mother Earth is an ancient and central Native American figure. In this radical and comprehensive rethinking, Sam D. Gill traces the evolution of female earth imagery in ... [Show full abstract] North America from the sixteenth century to the present and reveals how the evolution of the current Mother Earth figure was influenced by prevailing European-American imagery of America and the Indians as well as by the rapidly changing Indian identity. Gill also analyzes the influential role of scholars in creating and establishing the imagery that underlay the recent origins of Mother Earth and, upon reflection, he raises serious questions about the nature of scholarship. "Mother Earth might be modern, stressing the supposed biological ground of native life and its rich mythic tradition, but it hardly frees the native people from their long, lamentable involvement with the white man. For making this point clear, Gill deserves high praise."âBernard W. Sheehan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "In one of the finest studies of recent years we have an ambitious attempt to satisfy scholar, Native American, popular reader, and truth."âThomas McElwain, Western Folklore

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Developmental Stages and Rhetorical Strategies

September 2014

Steven Heine

A critical overview examines the main chronological stages and philosophical discussions that characterize the unfolding of the koan tradition extending from the earliest days of Zen Buddhism through the classical, medieval, and modern phases of development. Also shown are the ways that diverse cultural influences, including imagery borrowed from legalism, the fine arts, folklore, and military ... [Show full abstract] strategies, infiltrated and helped shape the construction of koan writings. In addition, the analysis considers the role of schismatic debates, forceful at times, involving rhetorical strategies in relation to meditative training with koan cases. Koans were originally oral teachings that were not supposed to be written down, but without transcribed documents their meaning would be lost. From the onset of the koan tradition, a fundamental source of tension or conflict eventually led to harsh sectarian discord about the role of speech and silence in forming and practicing this discourse.

Article

The Fox's craft in Japanese religion and folklore: Shapeshifters, transformations and duplicities

January 2003

Michael Bathgate

For more than a millennium, the fox has been a ubiquitous figure at the margins of the Japanese collective imagination. In the writings of the nobility and the motifs of popular literature, the fox is known as a shapeshifter, able to assume various forms in order to deceive others. Focusing on recurring themes of transformation and duplicity in folklore, theology, and court and village practice, ... [Show full abstract] The Fox's Craft explores the meanings and uses of shapeshifter fox imagery in Japanese history. Michael Bathgate finds that the shapeshifting powers of the fox make it a surprisingly fundamental symbol in the discourse of elite and folk alike, and a key component in formulations of marriage and human identity, religious knowledge, and the power of money. The symbol of the shapeshifter fox thus provides a vantage point from which to understand the social practice of signification.

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Mythology in W. B. Yeast's Early Poetry

October 2010 · Kufa Journal of Arts

Because Irish myth and folklore had been suppressed by church doctrine and British control of school system, W.B.Yeats used his poetry as a tool for re-educating the Irish population about their heritage and as a strategy for developing Irish nationalism. Thus the participation of Yeats in the Irish political system had its origins in his interest in Irish myth and folklore. Yeats retold entire ... [Show full abstract] folktales in epic poems and plays and used fragments of stories in shorter poems. Moreover, he presented poems which deal with subjects, images, and themes called from folklore. Most important, Yeats infused his poetry with a rich sense of Irish culture. Even poems that do not deal explicitly with subjects from myth retain powerful tinges of indigenous Irish culture. Yeats often borrowed word selection, verse form, and patterns of imagery directly from traditional Irish myth and folklore.

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Draining life forces : Vampirism in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights /

Julie Ann. Thilmany

In her novel, Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte creates the first female vampire in English literature. This creation of the female vampire provided Brontë with the means to comment on and criticize the roles women were forced to play in the nineteenth century. While there have been interpretations of Wuthering Heights which include vampires as part of the critical lens through which the novel is ... [Show full abstract] discussed, these interpretations focus on the vampire as merely a metaphorical tool used by Brontë. But there is much evidence within the novel that Catherine was a literal vampire, and this existence allowed her the freedom she was not afforded as a mortal woman in the nineteenth century. Emily Brontë had knowledge of the vampire in literature, having grown up reading from her father's chiefly Romantic library, including works from Byron, Keats, Coleridge, and Polidori. She was also known to have been a reader of German literature, where the vampire was a common character in reaction to the "common sense" literature of the eighteenth century. Emily Brontë offers much evidence in Wuthering Heights as to the vampirism of the character of Catherine Earnshaw Linton. Drawing from both folklore and the popular literature of the nineteenth century, Brontë shows her acquaintance with the character of the vampire on numerous levels. In both Catherine's transformation into a vampire, as well as her return to initiate Heathcliff into her after-death lifestyle, Brontë draws on both well-known and obscure traits of vampirism to show the vampire who lurk in the shadows of the entire novel. After transforming Catherine into a vampire, Emily Brontë uses the vampire motif to explore the issues of rebelliousness, power, escape, and sexuality as found in women of the nineteenth century. By making Catherine a vampire, Brontë is able to create a strong female character who represents all the characteristics that were seen as negative or inappropriate when found in women. Catherine's vampirism allows her an escape from this system, a freedom she could not find in life. Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (M.A.)--Iowa State University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references.

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Beyond the Vampire: Revamping Thai Monsters for the Urban Age

May 2017 · eTropic electronic journal of studies in the tropics

Katarzyna Ancuta

This article revisits two of the most iconic Thai monstrosities, phi pop and phi krasue , whose changing representation owes equally as much to local folklore, as to their ongoing reinterpretations in popular culture texts, particularly in film and television. The paper discusses two such considerations, Paul Spurrier’s P (2005) and Yuthlert Sippapak’s Krasue Valentine (2006), films that reject ... [Show full abstract] the long-standing notion that animistic creatures belong in the countryside and portray phi pop and phi krasue ’s adaptation to city life. Though commonplace, animistic beliefs and practices have been deemed incompatible with the dominant discourses of modernization and urbanization that characterise twenty-first century Thailand. Creatures like phi pop and phi krasue have been branded as uncivilised superstition and ridiculed through their unflattering portrayals in oddball comedies. This article argues that by inviting these monsters to relocate to contemporary Bangkok, Spurrier and Sippapak redefine their attributes for the modern urban setting and create hybrids by blending local beliefs and cinematic conventions. The creatures’ predatory character is additionally augmented by the portrayal of the city as itself vampiric. The article therefore reads these predatory spirits in parallel with the metaphor of the female vampire – a sexually aggressive voracious creature that threatens male patriarchal order and redefines motherhood.

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THE ENDURANCE OF THE GOTHIC THE ROMANTICS’ CONTRIBUTION TO THE VAMPIRE MYTH

December 2018 · Knowledge International Journal

Natalija Pop Zarieva

The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, also known as the period of Romanticism, were marked with the interest of the authors in nature and emotions, but also in the supernatural, horrible and the exotic. Although it was the era of reason and the progress of sciences, critics have identified the significance of the Gothic influence on the works of most of ... [Show full abstract] the English Romantic figures, among which Lord Byron is known to have had the major influence on the creation and persistence of the vampire figure, as a Gothic trope, haunting the last and this century’s literature and film. This paper attempts to unravel the origins and nature of the mysterious cultural appeal to the literary vampire by tracing its origins from Eastern European folklore, the first poem titled “Der Vampir”(1743) by Heinrich Ossenfelder, to the German Sturm and Drang poets, such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Gottfried August Buerger and their respective poems “Die Braut von Korinth” (1789) and “Lenore” (1773). The role of British ballad writers Southey, Lewis and Scott and their ballad collections will be considered as a significant effort to “renew the spirit” of British poetry which according to Scott had reached “a remarkably low ebb in Britain” (as cited in Thomson, 2002, p.80). Another literary figure engaged in writing Gothic ballads following the tradition of Mathew Lewis, not so well-known during her time, was the Scottish writer Anne Bannerman. Her ballad “Dark Ladie” deserves special attention in this context, as it features a female character who is transformed from the previous ballad tradition: from a passive victim of male seduction, here she becomes a fatal woman who comes back from the undead to seek for revenge and initiates the line of female vampires such as Keats’s “Lamia” and Coleridge’s “Christabel”. Thus, this paper elaborates on the major contributors to the Gothic stream in poetry in the specific period, mainly ballads, and traces the presence and development of Gothic elements and vampiric features. The continuous appeal to the Gothic found its place in the works of several major English Romantics, even though they put great effort to differentiate their poetry from the popular literature of the day – Gothic novels. This paper will concentrate on Lord Byron’s Oriental tale The Giaour (1813) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Both works incorporate Gothic themes, settings and characters, but there hasn’t been much literary focus with reference to the vampire theme they are based on. Although, critics have observed the contribution of the ambivalent vampire figure in Romantic literature, critical evaluation of the growth of this Gothic character in these two poems until now is incomplete. Hence, we will focus on Byron and Coleridge’s appropriation of the vampire figure and their contribution to the growth of this character. The various metaphoric usages of this character will also be explored and defined to determine their purpose.

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Kujund kui narratiivi allikas iiri rahvajuttudes

January 2004 · Mäetagused

Daíthí Ó hÓgáin

At the most basic level of folk fancy and belief, it is clear that an image which impresses itself on the mind of an individual or group of individuals has the potential to be given significance in the surrounding culture. In the same way, actual narratives owe much to the influence of striking images. Imagery plays an important and often basic role in the actual spread of folk narratives, most ... [Show full abstract] obviously in the case of the genre which we refer to as the migratory legend. Ireland has the oldest literature of Europe, apart from Greek and Latin, and so the researcher into Irish lore has sources at his disposal which range widely on the historical as well as the geographical plain. The article discusses the relationship between the brightness of the otherworld, which is so often met with in Irish sources, and the darkness of the nocturnal world of the dead. The duality in ancient Celtic belief concerning the worlds of the living and the dead gave rise to narratives concerning the divine personages Fionn (meaning `white') and Donn (meaning `black'). Well into the 20th century, stories were told in Irish folklore of great battles fought between two otherworld troops - the fairies of the southern province of Munster under the leadership of Donn Firinne, and the fairies of the western province of Connacht under the leadership of Fionnbharra. In more modern folklore, the two figures continue their periodic contests.

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Imagining the Indian Nationalist Movement: Revolutionary Metaphors in Imagery of the Freedom Struggl...

January 2013 · Journal of Material Culture

Kama Maclean

Recent interventions suggest that the history of India’s nationalist movement might be profitably reconstructed with reference to visual culture as a way of counteracting both dominant Congress teleologies and the colonial prejudices embedded in governmental records. This article furthers this hypothesis by undertaking a close examination of Desh Chintan, a rich nationalist image from the 1930s. ... [Show full abstract] Grounding Desh Chintan against a matrix of archival sources, banned literature, oral history interviews and other posters of the era presents a substantially different picture of the way in which the anti-colonial movement was conceived in the 1930s. This analysis suggests that there was a moment in the freedom struggle in which support for acts of retributive revolutionary violence were unproblematically maintained alongside genuine enthusiasm for the Gandhian program of non-violence.

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Performing Nation Diva Style: "La Tequilera"

March 2018

K. Angelique Dwyer

Mexican-American pop singer Lila Downs and Mexican cabaret artist Astrid Hadad each perform nation in their very different interpretations of Lucha Reyes’s classic 1930’s Mexican song: “La tequilera.” Downs and Hadad construct and represent national, ethnic, and gender identity in their performances within a border and/or transnational context. I explore how their choice of art form facilitates ... [Show full abstract] the construction of their own identities. My theoretical methodology embraces a cultural-studies approach to dramatic, visual and performative texts. All of these play an important role in redefining female Chicana/Mexican-American/Mexicana identity as a site of cultural and political contestation and struggle. The interdisciplinary character of this article corresponds to the nature of performance itself, as well as to the search for female identity formation within what Américo Paredes has termed “Greater Mexico.” I use the term Performing Nation to analyze how Downs and Hadad embody and enact specific regional and national identities through costume choice, vocal inflection, song choice and imagery. Though both Downs and Hadad reference Mexico in their performances of La tequilera, they do so by using a different context and tone. Hadad ironically performs Mexico through cabaret. Her humorous critiques of Mexican gender norms encourage her audience to envision a more egalitarian future for Mexico. Downs performs Greater Mexico through folk culture. Her oscillation between the new and the "authentic" promotes the idea that folklore is malleable and willing to change. By using the norteña and fusing it with other beats, Downs is performing a nation that is in movement, constantly changing, evolving and transmuting; her objective is to perform a transnational nation for a world market. Hadad performs nation for the nation. Her objective is to look within the nation and its capital to create an ironic commentary of it, inviting the audience to de-, re- and co-create. Downs and Hadad construct mobile identities that extend the Mexican cultural sphere across the northern border into the U.S. The porous nature of the border enables these northern identities to circulate back to Mexico. By participating in this cross-border identity building process, Hadad and Downs situate themselves as public figures, as women artists, within the Greater Mexico that they are reshaping.

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Black Power Children's Literature: Julius Lester and Black Power

May 2019 · Journal of American Studies

Nick Batho

This article examines a small selection of children's books by Julius Lester, a black power activist, considering them in the context of the black power movement. Lester is frequently cited for his activism and polemical works on black power but no study of his works for children has yet been published. The works considered in this article provide an example of how children's books during this ... [Show full abstract] period reflected aspects of black power ideology, language and imagery. Whilst books for black children in the USA had a long history of trying to instil racial pride and knowledge of African American history, these efforts were nevertheless restricted for various reasons. This article argues that it was the black power movement that provided a context in which books directed at black children could flourish. Librarians, activists, educators and publishers now engaged in providing literature for black children in a more comprehensive and directed way than before. Within this context, authors like Julius Lester could write books that celebrated African American history and folklore and could at the same time address issues of racial tension and white cultural hegemony.

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Rhampsinitus, Setne Khamwas and the Descent to the Netherworld: Some Remarks on Herodotus II, 122, 1

September 2011 · Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions

Jose M. Serrano Delgado

The purpose of this article is to analyse Pharaoh Rhampsinitus’ descent to the Underworld, briefly reported by Herodotus (II, 122, 1) and included by the Greek writer in the legendary history of Egypt. This short episode can be connected to the demotic cycle of Setne Khamwas, to be precise when this literary hero seizes a book of magic from a tomb after playing dice—the Egyptian senet—with the ... [Show full abstract] dead. These two stories share a common origin, arising possibly from the same folkloric tradition from the second half of the First Millenium B.C. But even if the adventure of Rhampsinitus is one of the many underworld motifs which occur in folklore throughout the world, it is important to note that the descent to hell is not a recurrent theme in Egyptian imagery. Here we are dealing possibly with a foreign topic, even an interpretatio graeca of the katabasis of Rhampsinitus, Herodotus being influenced by the echoes of the doctrines of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans, and trying to support the supposedly Egyptian belief in the transmigration of the soul, a clearly dubious statement.