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The profoundly creative works of Mervyn Peake have fascinated readers for decades. His Gormenghast sequence of novels, recently serialized to great acclaim by the BBC, stands as one of the great imaginative accomplishments of twentieth-century literature. In The Voice of the Heart, G. Peter Winnington, the world’s foremost expert on Peake, explores his subject’s well-known fiction alongside the poetry, plays, and illustrations for which Peake is equally lauded. He traces recurrent motifs through Peake’s works and examines in detail his long-neglected play, The Wit to Woo. Through close readings of all these elements of Peake’s oeuvre, Winnington ultimately offers unparalleled insight into one of British literature’s most vibrant imaginations.
Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies by G. Peter Winnington Pdf
Peter Winnington follows Peake's life from his birth in China through his student years and a sojourn in an artists' colony on Sark, his marriage and his frustrating years as a soldier when he wished to be a war artist. Yet the 1940s, marked by a traumatic visit to newly liberated Belsen in 1945, were his most productive years. From the middle of the 1950s Parkinson's disease gradually prevented him from working and led to his premature death in 1968. --Book Jacket.
"New Makers of Modern Culture takes into full account the rise and fall of reputation and influence over the last twenty-five years and the epochal changes that have occurred: the demise of Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rise and fall of postmodernism; the eruption of Islamic fundamentalism; the triumph of the Internet. Containing over eight hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, New Makers includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. With its global reach, New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing. There is an index of names and key terms."--Publisher's description
From The Brothers Karamazov to Star Trek to Twin Peaks, this collection explores a variety of different imaginary worlds both historic and contemporary. Featuring contributions from an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars, each essay looks at a particular imaginary world in-depth, and world-building issues associated with that world. Together, the essays explore the relationship between the worlds and the media in which they appear as they examine imaginary worlds in literature, television, film, computer games, and theatre, with many existing across multiple media simultaneously. The book argues that the media incarnation of a world affects world structure and poses unique obstacles to the act of world-building. The worlds discussed include Nazar, Barsetshire, Skotopogonievsk, the Vorkosigan Universe, Grover’s Corners, Gormenghast, Collinsport, Daventry, Dune, the Death Gate Cycle universe, Twin Peaks, and the Star Trek galaxy. A follow-up to Mark J. P. Wolf ’s field-defining book Building Imaginary Worlds, this collection will be of critical interest to students and scholars of popular culture, subcreation studies, transmedia studies, literature, and beyond.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature by Brian Stableford Pdf
Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.
Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel by Sara Martín Pdf
Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort sits at the intersection of literary studies and masculinity studies, arguing that the villain, in many works of contemporary British fiction, is a patriarchal figure that embodies an excess of patriarchal power that needs to be controlled by the hero. The villains' stories are enactments of empowerment fantasies and cautionary tales against abusing patriarchal power. While providing readers with in-depth studies of some of the most popular contemporary fiction villans, Sara Martín shows how current representations of the villain are not only measured against previous literary characters but also against the real-life figure of the archvillain Adolf Hitler.
Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.
Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature by Allen Stroud Pdf
Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.
Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature by William Hughes Pdf
Provides an extensive chronology and an introduction which explains the nature of Gothic and shows how it has evolved. Includes entries on major writers, and works of geographical variants like Irish, Scottish or Russian Gothic and Female Gothic, Queer Gothic and Science Fiction.
After a decade from 1965 which had seen the growth in Britain and America of an enormous interest in fantasy literature, and a rise in its academic repute from cold to lukewarm, a serious study of the subject seemed long overdue. In this first critical book in its time on modern English fantasy, Colin Manlove surveys a representative group of modern fantasies—in the Victorian period in the children's scientific and Christian fantasy The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley and the mystical fantasy of the Scottish writer George MacDonald; and from the twentieth century the interplanetary romances of C. S. Lewis, the post-war fantasy of rebellious youth in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and the quest to avert apocalypse in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The aim with all these works is to show the peculiar literary experiences they offer and to assess their strengths and limitations in relation to wider English literature. In the introduction to his book, Manlove gives a definition of fantasy, marking off the genre from its near neighbors science fiction and “Gothic” or horror story, and distinguishing between fantasies that are serious works of imagination and those that are fanciful or escapist. Each chapter that follows is primarily a literary analysis set in a context of the writer's life, thought, and other works. As the book proceeds, there begins to emerge a picture of the originality and merit of the writers, but at the same time the sense of a division in the purpose of each writer, whereby their works fail to abide by their own laws. In the conclusion to this book Manlove draws the different types of division found into one and argues that the problem is one that is endemic to the writing of modern fantasy.
Jag, short for Jaguar, was orphaned when her environmentalist parents died in the jungle saving animals’ lives. Although she was put into a care home, she ran away two years to live on the streets where she was adopted into a street gang who have now become her family. Danny, the trickster and street magician and Tiger, whose animal instincts run close to the surface, and a few others are all animal activists at heart. Although they go one night to an animal sanctuary in the country to tag the walls with graffiti, Jag gets caught in an enclosure. However, it ends up for the best as the keeper takes a shine to her and offers a part time job when she hears Jag’s affinity with the Jaguar spirit. With Jag working at the sanctuary, her gang start spending more time there to see the great Cat Man Do perform his animal magic – until one day when a tiger is let out its cage. And that is only the beginning as a villainous Cat Man begins to stalk the streets with two pet panthers out for blood, seemingly appearing and disappearing at will. With newspapers reporting maulings and deaths and Sergeant Dickins not sure what’s going on, the kids are intrigued by the reports. After witnessing an attack, the kids get sucked into this mysterious Cat Man’s idea of a theatrical villain performance – but even if they have animal instincts and spirits with them and even if the big cats are swaying to their side, should they run before they too turn prey?
Alchemy is thought to have originated over 2000 years ago in Hellenic Egypt, the result of three converging streams: Greek philosophy, Egyptian technology and the mysticism of Middle Eastern religions. Its heyday was from about 800 A.D. to the middle of the seventeenth century, and its practitioners ranged from kings, popes, and emperors to minor clergy, parish clerks, smiths, dyers, and tinkers. Even such accomplished men as Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Sir Thomas Browne and Isaac Newton took an interest in alchemical matters. In its search for the "Philosopher's Stone" that would transmute base metals into silver and gold, alchemy took on many philosophical, religious and mystical overtones. These and many other facets of alchemy are explored with enormous insight and erudition in this classic work. E. J. Holmyard, a noted scholar in the field, begins with the alchemists of ancient Greece and China and goes on to discuss alchemical apparatus, Islamic and early Western alchemy; signs, symbols, and secret terms; Paracelsus; English, Scottish and French alchemists; Helvetius, Price, and Semler, and much more. Ranging over two millennia of alchemical history, Mr. Holmyard shows how, like astrology and witchcraft, alchemy was an integral part of the pre-scientific moral order, arousing the cupidity of princes, the blind fear of mobs and the intellectual curiosity of learned men. Eventually, however, with the advent and ascension of the scientific method, the hopes and ideas of the alchemists faded to the status of "pseudo-science." That transformation, as well as alchemy's undeniable role as a precursor of modern chemistry, are brilliantly illuminated in this book. Students of alchemy, chemistry, the history of science, and the occult, plus anyone interested in the origin and evolution of one of mankind's most enduring and influential myths, will want to have a copy of this masterly study.
"This book traces the continued existence of the spiritual alchemy of rebirth in heterodox and specifically Boehmist circles from around 1600 to the early twentieth century. The basic claim of continuity from Boehme to Atwood argued here is not new. A particularly apt expression may be found in F. Sherwood Taylor's The Alchemists of 1949, in which the founding editor of Ambix notes 'the existence of a school of mystical alchemists whose purpose was self-regeneration.' With Boehme as an important early exponent, this 'tendency culminated in 1850' with Atwood's Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery. Taylor's statement, it turns out, could hardly have been more accurate yet has so far lacked the support of a comprehensive presentation. This led Principe and Newman to describe such claims of continuity regarding spiritual alchemy as mere 'conjecture' without 'clear historical evidence.' This book marshals that hitherto elusive evidence, much of it found in obscure manuscript sources, and thus documents the continuity of spiritual alchemy that links the early-modern to the modern era"--
The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy by B. J. T. Dobbs Pdf
This book sets the foundations of Newton's alchemy in their historical context in Restoration England. It is shown that alchemical modes of thought were quite strong in many of those who provided the dynamism for the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and that these modes of thought had important relationships with general movements for reform in the same period.