Signs & wonders : essays on literature & culture
"This collection draws together essays written over twenty-five years, offering a wide-ranging retrospective of Marina Warner's developing ideas. Whether writing on literature, drama, film or opera, or on religion, politics, gender and language, Marina Warner displays a rare gift for blending historical and anthropological insights with deft and perceptive readings of individual works." "The sections of the book range from explorations of our showers of toads, to the power of symbols and the complexity of human attitudes to bodies and minds, to ourselves and strangers. Finding unexpected links between the images of poetry, fiction, art and politics, she turns her attention to the Caribbean and to contemporary she allows us to listen attentively, in unexpected ways, to powerful voices of past and present, from St. Paul and Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll and Angela Carter."--Jacket
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xii, 516 pages ; 24 cm
9780701173326, 0701173327
52327104
Prologue: Seeking the Slant
1. Early Encounters
The Bitch Route 13
The Crushed Butterflies of War
My Day
Jessica Mitford
Bob Treuhaft
The Female Form Defined
Mrs Thatcher
Making It Big in the New World
Angela Carter
2. Words and Symbols
Saint Paul: Let Women Keep Silent
Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
Watch your Tongues
Obscenity
Fighting Talk
Saint Cunera's Scarf
Language, Power, Fear
The Sign of the Dollar
3. Bodies and Minds
Harmoniously Arranged Livers
Magic Zones
The Virtue of Incest
The Marquise Unmasked: Les Liaisons dangereuses
'Wild at Heart': Manon Lescaut
In the Mirror of Madness: Elaine Showalter
Fasting Girls
Bloated
Body Politic: Madonna
Sites of Desire
Love's Work: Gillian Rose
Is There Another Place from which the Dickhead's Self Can Speak?
4. Faiths and Marvels
Wrestling with the Oldest Rules: The First Commandment
Signs of the Times: Touching Tears
Omens of Millennium
Suffering Souls
The Greatest Saint after Sainte Marie
The Triumph of the Moon
Dom Sylvestor Houedard
Showers of Toads
Amber
Poison
5. Shakespearean Transformations
Rough Magic and Sweet Lullaby
Shakespeare and the Goddess
Maps of Elsewhere
Shakespeare's Caliban
The Silence of Sycorax
Its Own Dark Styx: Caryl Phillips
Castaway on the Ocean of Story
6. Creole
Between the Colonist and the Creole
Noonday Devils
Siren/Hyphen; or 'The Maid Beguiled'
Cannibals and Kings: King Kong
Bananas
Zombie: The Devil Inside
7. Fairies, Myths and Magic
Aesop
Roberto Calasso
Louis XIV
La Fontaine
Under the Executioner's Sword
Laughter and Hope in the Old Wives' Tale
Mother Russia
8. Reworking the Tale
Combat Myths
Donkey Business, Donkey Work: In the House of Crossed Desires
'Large as life, and twice as natural': Lewis Carroll
Struwwelpeter
Revelling in Hope
Cunning and High Spirits
The Inexpressible Closeness of the Deer
Hoopoe: Ted Hughes
Myth and Faerie: Rewritings and Recoveries
Coda: Who's Sorry Now?