Renaissance Fantasies

Renaissance Fantasies

Author: Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast

Publisher: Kent State University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780873386449

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Explores why some early modern writers put their masculine literary authority at risk by writing from the perspective of femininity and effeminacy. The text argues that such work promoted alternatives to the dominant patriarchal aesthetics by celebrating unruly female and effeminate male bodies.


Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism

Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism

Author: Helen Dell

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1526173948

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.


The Folding Knife

The Folding Knife

Author: K. J. Parker

Publisher: Orbit

Published: 2010-02-22

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0316072109

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A new stand-alone novel from the acclaimed author of the Engineer Trilogy and The Company. Basso the Magnificent. Basso the Great. Basso the Wise. The First Citizen of the Vesani Republic is an extraordinary man. He is ruthless, cunning, and above all, lucky. He brings wealth, power and prestige to his people. But with power comes unwanted attention, and Basso must defend his nation and himself from threats foreign and domestic. In a lifetime of crucial decisions, he's only ever made one mistake. One mistake, though, can be enough.


Ficino and Fantasy

Ficino and Fantasy

Author: Marieke J.E. van den Doel

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9004459685

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? This book starts with an exploration of Ficino’s views on the imagination and discusses whether, how and why these ideas may have been received in Italian Renaissance works of art.


Medieval Fantasy as Performance

Medieval Fantasy as Performance

Author: Michael A. Cramer

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0810869950

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book, Michael Cramer views the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), an organization that studies and recreates the middle ages, as a case study for a growing fascination with medieval fantasy in popular culture. He explores the act of medieval re-creation as performance by focusing on the SCA, describing the group's activities, investigating its place in popular culture, and looking at the SCA not so much as a historical society but as an on-going work of performance art; a postmodern counter-culture riff on what it means to be "medieval." Cramer examines the group's activities, from persona and character development to theatrical performance and personal interaction; from the complex official ceremonies to full contact armored combat with mock broadswords. He explores the SCA in detail to discover how its members adapt and employ ideas about the Middle Ages in performance, ritual reenactment, living history, and re-creation, analyzing the performance of identity through ritual, sport, drama, and personal interaction, and he focuses on the reconstruction of the medieval "king game," a game in which a mock king is chosen to reign over a mock court. The book also studies various ideas about medievalism, including the contrast between reenactment and re-creation, and places these activities in the context of contemporary American society. With three appendixes, a bibliography, and a selection of photos, Cramer demonstrates how and why medieval fantasy is increasingly used in popular culture and analyzes the dissatisfaction with contemporary culture that leads people into these realms of fantasy.


Nuclear Madness

Nuclear Madness

Author: Ira Chernus

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1991-02-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0791498913

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book builds on Robert Jay Lifton's theory of psychic numbing, and takes madness as a guiding metaphor. It shows that public perceptions of the Bomb are a kaleidoscope of ever-changing ideas and images. Recent changes in public awareness only signal new symptoms of this public madness, symptoms unwittingly fostered by the antinuclear movement. Since the newest nuclear images follow the same psychological pattern as their predecessors, they are likely to lead us deeper into nuclear madness. Chernus offers new interpretations of four major theorists int the psychology of religion—Paul Tillich, R.D. Laing, Mircea Eliade, and James Hillman—to trace the roots of nuclear madness back to the onset of modernity, when the West gained technological mastery at the price of losing religious imagination and ontological security. The author develops an interpretation of Lifton's own thought as an ontological and religious psychology. Drawing on the work of Eliade and Hillman, he goes on to suggest that madness reflects a repressed desire to transform life by opening up the floodgates of imagination. A conscious cultivation of the play of imagination can lead the way through madness to sanity and peace. But, imagination can only respond to the nuclear threat if it is acted out in a new brand of peace activism that blends pragmatic politics with psychological and religious transformation.


Strictly Fantasy

Strictly Fantasy

Author: Gerald Nachtwey

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-04-23

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1476675716

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Role-playing games seemed to appear of nowhere in the early 1970s and have been a quiet but steady presence in American culture ever since. This new look at the hobby searches for the historical origins of role-playing games deep in the imaginative worlds of Western culture. It looks at the earliest fantasy stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the fans--both readers and writers--who wanted to bring them to life, at the Midwestern landscape and the middle-class households that were the hobby's birthplace, and at the struggle to find meaning and identity amidst cultural conflicts that drove many people into these communities of play. This book also addresses race, religion, gender, fandom, and the place these games have within American capitalism. All the paths of this journey are connected by the very quality that has made fantasy role-playing so powerful: it binds the limitless imagination into a "strict" framework of rules. Far from being an accidental offshoot of marginalized fan communities, role-playing games' ability to hold contradictions in dynamic, creative tension made them a necessary and central product of the twentieth century.


Fantasies of Female Evil

Fantasies of Female Evil

Author: Cristina León Alfar

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9780874137811

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focuses on Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The winter's tale. UkBU.