Author : Thelma J. Shinn
Publisher : Praeger
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 15,77 MB
Release : 1996-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :
An exciting study of novels by ten women writers who have combined the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life.
Author : Kimberley McMahon-Coleman
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 19,37 MB
Release : 2014-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0786492503
In recent years, shapeshifting characters in literature, film and television have been on the rise. This has followed the increased use of such characters as metaphors, with novelists and critics identifying specific meanings and topics behind them. This book aims to unravel the shapeshifting trope. Rather than pursue a case-based study, the works are grouped around specific themes--adolescence, gender, sexuality, race, disability, addiction, and spirituality--that are explored through the metaphor of shapeshifting. Because of the transformative possibilities of this metaphor and its flexibility, the shapeshifter has the potential to change how we see our world. With coverage of iconic fantasy texts and a focus on current works, the book engages with the shapeshifting figure in popular culture from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Author : Rosalyn Greene
Publisher : Weiser Books
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 47,35 MB
Release : 2000-09-01
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9781578631711
Shapeshifters are people with animal medicine, people who can connect with and use their animal powers. Those with access to this magical power can shift mentally, astrally, or even physically into their power animal or totem. Rosalyn Greene's ability to shift, both mentally and astrally, combined with her extensive study of the secret shapeshifting folklore, has resulted in this fascinating examination of all aspects and forms of shifting. In The Magic of Shapeshifting, Rosalyn Greene guides us through the levels of reality that lie outside our physical world and into the infinite universe that exists both within and beyond the limited boundaries of our senses. We read about opening to our inner animal self--normally dwelling within the subconscious--and letting it pervade more of our conscious waking mind. Detailed explanations and exercises teach shifters about their animal side, the animal spirit guide, and how we can become shifters. She shows us how to distinguish powerful visions, anxiety attacks, and imagination from real shifting, as well as how to recognize the warning signs of an imminent shift. Since there can be dangers and risks on both the mundane and psychic levels when we pursue the path of a shifter, many of the potential dangers associated with specific practices are carefully outlined. Shapeshifting links us with both the fundamental power of animals and with the higher self, our true being, the soul. We learn to release self-limiting ideas of our true nature and expand into a clear, conscious connection with the divine, eternal soul, whose reality is beyond whatever mind (or even body) we happen to possess at the moment. Shapeshifting is a spiritual journey, a very tough one, but very rewarding. It has a purpose and reality far beyond simply using shifter abilities for earthly benefits. It can lead us through the unseen veil that seems to separate us from our Selves.
Author : Aimee Meredith Cox
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 23,49 MB
Release : 2015-08-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0822375370
In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.
Author : Sharon Blackie
Publisher : September Publishing
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 11,97 MB
Release : 2019-09-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1912836238
Beautiful, rich short stories, drawing on myth and folklore to bring to life women's remarkable ability to transform themselves in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances. 'A book for all the wild women ... Foxfire, Wolfskin is simply the most perfect thing. I love each and every placement of each word. Love the wildness, the shapeshifting, the fearsomeness of it.' Jackie Morris, co-author of The Lost Words ' She lived fully, my fox, and I envied her with all my heart. I wanted to dance with her, sister or lover, across the snow-clad vastness of this land. Together, we'd create the Northern Lights. For that is what foxes do racing over the fells, whipping up the snow with their tails, the friction of it sending up sparks into the midnight sky. This is what makes the aurora's glow. Revontulet , we call it: foxfire.' Charged with drama and beauty, this memorable collection by a master storyteller weaves a magical world of possibility and power from female myths of physical renewal, creation and change. It is an extraordinary immersion into the bodies and voices, mindscapes and landscapes, of the shapeshifting women of our native folklore. Drawing on myth and fairy tales found across Europe from Croatia to Sweden, Ireland to Russia, these stories are about coming to terms with our animal natures, exploring the ways in which we might renegotiate our fractured relationship with the natural world, and uncovering the wildness and wilderness within. Beautifully illustrated by Helen Nicholson, Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women is Blackie's first collection of short stories. 'Sharon Blackie has wrought a new-old magic for our times: glorious, beautiful, passionate myths. They show who we could have been, and they give us a glimpse of a world-that-could-be.' Manda Scott, author of A Treachery of Spies and Boudica 'A deeply evocative and haunting collection ... Part rally cry, part warning, part manifesto and all parts enchanting, Sharon Blackie's Foxfire, Wolfskin is a deeply evocative and haunting collection. I want to press this powerful book into the hands of everyone I know and say listen. ' Holly Ringland, author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart
Author : Lisa M. Bitel
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 50,31 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9780801485442
"This book disperses the shadows in an obscure but important landscape. Lisa Bitel addresses both the history of women in early Ireland and the history of myth, legend, and superstition which surrounded them. It is a powerful and exact book and an invaluable addition to our expanding sense of Ireland through the eyes of Irish women."--Eavan Boland, author of In a Time of Violence: Poems"It is refreshing to read in a book by a woman on medieval women that not all clerics hated women and that not all men were oversexed villains consciously bent on exploiting women. [Bitel] challenges not only the medieval Irish male construct of female behavior, but she is also courageous enough to question constructs of medieval women invented by modern Irish medieval historians."--Times Higher Education Supplement
Author : Ricki Stefanie Tannen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 12,73 MB
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 131772433X
The Female Trickster presents a Post-Jungian postmodern perspective regarding the role of women in contemporary Western society by investigating the re-emergence of female trickster energy in all aspects of popular culture. Ricki Tannen explores the psychological aspects of what happened when women’s imagination was legally and psychologically enclosed millennia ago and demonstrates how the re-emergence of Trickster energy through the female imagination has the radical potential to effect a transformation of western consciousness. Examples are drawn from a diverse range of sources, from Jane Austen, and female sleuth narratives, to Madonna and Sex and the City, illustrating how Trickster energy is used not to maintain power and control but to integrate and unite the paradoxical through humour. Subjects covered include: imagination and metaphor the traditional trickster law and the imagination humour: Eros using logos the postmodern female trickster. This highly original perspective on women's role in contemporary culture will offer readers a new vision of how humour psychologically operates as a healthy adaptation to trauma and adversity. It will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as those in women's, cultural, legal and literary studies.
Author : John B. Kachuba
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 30,92 MB
Release : 2019-06-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1789140978
There is something about a shapeshifter—a person who can transform into an animal—that captures our imagination; that causes us to want to howl at the moon, or flit through the night like a bat. Werewolves, vampires, demons, and other weird creatures appeal to our animal nature, our “dark side,” our desire to break free of the bonds of society and proper behavior. Real or imaginary, shapeshifters lurk deep in our psyches and remain formidable cultural icons. The myths, magic, and meaning surrounding shapeshifters are brought vividly to life in John B. Kachuba’s compelling and original cultural history. Rituals in early cultures worldwide seemingly allowed shamans, sorcerers, witches, and wizards to transform at will into animals and back again. Today, there are millions of people who believe that shapeshifters walk among us and may even be world leaders. Featuring a fantastic and ghoulish array of examples from history, literature, film, TV, and computer games, Shapeshifters explores our secret desire to become something other than human.
Author : Serinity Young
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 41,91 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Art
ISBN : 0195307887
"Examines the motif of the flying woman as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. ... Throughout, Young demonstrates that female power has always been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it is a pervasive theme in these stories."--Jacket flap.
Author : Reverdia 'da River Trammell
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 11,52 MB
Release : 2011-08-04
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 1257957635
'Reverdia, the River Woman, ' since 1999, called the StoryTeller Poet. Born and raised in Los Angeles, daughter of a master Jazz musician and a divinely eclectic mother, she is by all definitions a Poet, inspired and refined by her journey and influence of the Leimert Park Village World Stage Anansi Writers' Workshop community. She is mother, prophet, poet, Shaman, healer. This book belongs on your shelf between Kahlil Gibran and Maya Angelou, on the table next to your bed, with you throughout your day. Once you commune with this collection of poetry, you won't want to be without this life companion reference. Write in it ! Make notes in the margins ! Draw in it ! But, just enjoy the journey !
