Women of Myth

Women of Myth
Author: Jenny Williamson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2023-02-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1507219415

"Get inspired with 50 fascinating stories of powerful female figures from mythologies around the world. From heroines and deities to leaders and mythical creatures, this collection explores figures of myth who can inspire modern readers with their ability to shape our culture with the stories of their power, wisdom, compassion, and cunning. Featured characters include: Atalanta (Greek heroine and huntress who killed the Caledonia Boar and joined the Argonauts); Sky-Woman (the first woman in Iroquois myth who fell through a hole in the sky and into our world); Clídna (Queen of the Banshees in Irish legend); and La Llorona (a ghostly woman in Mexican folklore who wanders the waterfront). Celebrate these game-changing, attention-worthy female characters with this collection of engaging tales"--

Women's Folklore, Women's Culture

Women's Folklore, Women's Culture
Author: Rosan A. Jordan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081229338X

The essays in Women's Folklore, Women's Culture focus on women performers of folklore and on women's genre of folklore. Long ignored, women's folklore is often collaborative and frequently is enacted in the privacy of the domestic sphere. This book provides insights balancing traditional folklore scholarship. All of the authors also explore the relationship between make and female views and worlds. The book begins with the private world of women, performances within the intimacy of family and fields; it then studies women's folklore in the public arena; finally, the book looks at the interrelationships between public and private arenas and between male and female activities. By turning our attention to previously ignored women's realms, these essays provide a new perspective from which to view human culture as a whole and make Women's Folklore, Women's Culture a significant addition to folklore scholarship

The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies

The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies
Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1033
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190840641

The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies surveys the materials, approaches, concepts, and applications of the field to provide a sweeping guide to American folklore and folklife, culture, history, and society. Forty-three comprehensive and diverse chapters delve into significant themes and methods of folklore and folklife study; established expressions and activities; spheres and locations of folkloric action; and shared cultures and common identities. Beyond the longstanding arenas of academic focus developed throughout the 350-year legacy of folklore and folklife study, contributors at the forefront of the field also explore exciting new areas of attention that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. Encompassing a wide range of cultural traditions in the United States, from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to group festivals, these chapters consider the meanings in oral, social, and material genres of dance, ritual, drama, play, speech, song, and story while drawing attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Weaving together such varied and manifest traditions, this handbook pays significant attention to the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries that have always been distinctive in the American experience, reflecting on the relative youth of the nation; global connections of customs brought by immigrants; mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous, urbanized, and racialized population; and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. Edited by leading folklore scholar Simon J. Bronner, this handbook celebrates the extraordinary richness of the American social and cultural fabric, offering a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of American studies, but also for the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.

Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer

Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer
Author: Bettina L. Knapp
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1989-09-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780271026466

The brilliant and far-reaching comparative and interdisciplinary work explores the impact of the machine on the literary mind and its ramifications. Knapp displays an unusual command of world literatures in dealing with a topic that is of outstanding importance to a broad field of scholars and generalists, including those concerned with contemporary literature, comparative literature, and Jungian theory. It is very much in line with the current trend toward interdisciplinary studies. Knapp offers powerful and original analyses of texts by French, Irish, Japanese, Israeli, German, Polish, and American authors: Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, Luigi Pirandello, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Juan Jose Arreola, S. Yizhar, Jiro Osaragi, N. K. Narayan, Peter Handke, and Sam Shepard. The authors explored here were deeply affected by the changes occurring in their lives and times and reacted to these ideationally and feelingly. In some of their writings, images, characters, and plots were used to create monstrous and robotlike individuals unable to accept the world around them and hence seeking to destroy it. Others of these writers attempted to understand and integrate the environmental, human, and mechanical alterations taking place about them, and to transform these into positive attributes. The realization of the increasing domination of the machine, we see, catalyzed and mobilized each author into action. Each in his own way spoke his mind, revealing the corrosive and beneficial factors in his world as he saw them.

Warriors, Witches, Women

Warriors, Witches, Women
Author: Kate Hodges
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1781319278

Meet mythology’s fifty fiercest females in this modern retelling of the world’s greatest legends. From feminist fairies to bloodsucking temptresses, half-human harpies and protective Vodou goddesses, these are women who go beyond long-haired, smiling stereotypes. Their stories are so powerful, so entrancing, that they have survived for millennia. Lovingly retold and updated, Kate Hodges places each heroine, rebel and provocateur firmly at the centre of their own narrative. Players include: Bewitching, banished Circe, an introvert famed and feared for her transfigurative powers. The righteous Furies, defiantly unrepentant about their dedication to justice. Fun-loving Ame-no-Uzume who makes quarrelling friends laugh and terrifies monsters by flashing at them. The fateful Morai sisters who spin a complex web of birth, life and death. Find your tribe, fire your imagination and be empowered by this essential anthology of notorious, demonised and overlooked women.

Women and Other Monsters

Women and Other Monsters
Author: Jess Zimmerman
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807054933

A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism The folklore that has shaped our dominant culture teems with frightening female creatures. In our language, in our stories (many written by men), we underline the idea that women who step out of bounds—who are angry or greedy or ambitious, who are overtly sexual or not sexy enough—aren’t just outside the norm. They’re unnatural. Monstrous. But maybe, the traits we’ve been told make us dangerous and undesirable are actually our greatest strengths. Through fresh analysis of 11 female monsters, including Medusa, the Harpies, the Furies, and the Sphinx, Jess Zimmerman takes us on an illuminating feminist journey through mythology. She guides women (and others) to reexamine their relationships with traits like hunger, anger, ugliness, and ambition, teaching readers to embrace a new image of the female hero: one that looks a lot like a monster, with the agency and power to match. Often, women try to avoid the feeling of monstrousness, of being grotesquely alien, by tamping down those qualities that we’re told fall outside the bounds of natural femininity. But monsters also get to do what other female characters—damsels, love interests, and even most heroines—do not. Monsters get to be complete, unrestrained, and larger than life. Today, women are becoming increasingly aware of the ways rules and socially constructed expectations have diminished us. After seeing where compliance gets us—harassed, shut out, and ruled by predators—women have never been more ready to become repellent, fearsome, and ravenous.

Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India

Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India
Author: Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501722875

In Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger analyzes six representative Indian folklore genres from a single regional repertoire to show the influence of their intertextual relations on the composition and interpretation of artistic performance. Placing special emphasis on women’s rituals, she looks at the relationship between the framework and organization of indigenous genres and the reception of folklore performance. The regional repertoire under examination presents a strikingly female-centered world. Female performers and characters are active, articulate, and frequently challenge or defy expectations of gender. Men also confound traditional gender roles. Flueckiger includes the translations of two full performance texts of narratives sung by female and male storytellers respectively.

Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters

Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters
Author: Kathleen Ragan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 494
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780393045987

Collects 100 tales from around the world, including Africa, Western Europe, Native American cultures, Asia, and the Middle East, that feature a heroine.

Women in Greek Myth

Women in Greek Myth
Author: Mary Lefkowitz
Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2007-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780715635650

In the first edition of "Women in Greek Myth," published in 1986, Mary R. Lefkowitz convincingly challenged narrow, ideological interpretations of the roles of female characters in Greek mythology. Where some scholars saw the Amazons as the last remnant of a forgotten matriarchy, Clytemnestra as a frustrated individualist, and Antigone as an oppressed revolutionary, Lefkowitz argued that such views were justified neither by the myths themselves nor by the relevant documentary evidence. Concentrating on those aspects of women's experience most often misunderstood - life apart from men, marriage, influence in politics, self-sacrifice and martyrdom, misogyny - she presented a far less negative account of the role of Greek women, both ordinary and extraordinary, as manifested in the central works of Greek literature. This updated and expanded edition includes six new chapters on such topics as heroic women in Greek epic, seduction and rape in Greek myth, and the parts played by women in ancient rites and festivals.Revisiting the original chapters as well to incorporate two decades of more recent scholarship, Lefkowitz again shows that what Greek men both feared and valued in women was not their sexuality but their intelligence.

Salt On Your Tongue

Salt On Your Tongue
Author: Charlotte Runcie
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1786891204

'An ode to the ocean, and the generations of women drawn to the waves or left waiting on the shore' Guardian In Salt On Your Tongue, Charlotte Runcie explores what the sea means to us, and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages. In mesmerising prose, she explores how the sea has inspired, fascinated and terrified us, and how she herself fell in love with the deep blue. This book is a walk on the beach with Turner, with Shakespeare, with the Romantic Poets and shanty-singers. It’s an ode to our oceans – to the sailors who brave their treacherous waters, to the women who lost their loved ones to the waves, to the creatures that dwell in their depths, to beachcombers, swimmers, seabirds and mermaids. Navigating through ancient Greek myths, poetry, shipwrecks and Scottish folktales, Salt On Your Tongue is about how the wild untameable waves can help us understand what it means to be human.