A STUDY ABOUT HOW TO CREATE A MYTHICAL BEAST SUCCESSFULLY, FOCUSING ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE NINE-TAILED FOX IN EASTERN ART

Mythical beasts appear in many forms across multiple cultures throughout human history. Their narratives and visual designs express important beliefs and desires of a given culture. By focusing on the aesthetics and history of the nine-tailed fox, a Chinese mythological, this thesis will explore the constructions and artistic techniques that have given shape to the myth. This thesis will also discuss my thesis project named Classic of Mountains and Seas. The ultimate aim of my creative project has been to develop an animation of new mythical beasts, and this paper situates my creations within the much broader history that has inspired them. As a classic mythical beast, the nine-tailed fox is a popular and culturally significant one in East Asian art and literature. Through out the ages, the nine-tailed fox has been depicted in a large number of artworks across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, fabric, and crafts. Additionally, there is a rich archive of records about the nine-tailed fox, indicating how pervasive this figure has been throughout history. It is precisely because of how its popularity and power have been maintained over such a long period of time that the nine-tailed fox will be regarded as an important reference for my own artistic practice as an animator

Some Celtic otherworld motifs in Brendan’s Voyage to Paradise

In Brendan’s Voyage to Paradise, there are scenes which suggest a translation from the natural world to the supernatural realms. These scenes have corresponding elements in Irish Voyage Tales. The scenes in the Voyage of Brendan include the Celebration of the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, the celebration of Easter on the back of Jasconius, the Crystal Pillar and the mist barrier that surrounds Paradise. Despite the Navigatio of Brendan’s message of Christian salvation, the pagan heritage of these texts is still eviden

Out of the wilderness : a fourteenth-century English drawing of John the Baptist

London, British Library, MS Royal 10 B XIV contains a large drawing of St. John the Baptist that is both exceptional for its quality and iconographically unique. Not previously noticed by art historians, it constitutes an important addition to English art of the early to mid-fourteenth century. This paper explores the physical nature of the drawing, its bibliographical context (in a book of natural philosophy), the nature and meaning of its imagery, and its artistic context and associations, within the broader framework of its ownership and use by Benedictine monks of Saint Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury. The drawing is considered a symptom of a wider interest in the acquisition of manuscript illumination at the abbey during the first half of the fourteenth century. It can be dated to about 1335-40 and is thought to have been executed in southeast England or East Anglia, where the works of art to which it is closest in stylistic and iconographic terms were produced. The iconography includes a number of motifs rare or unparalleled in images of John the Baptist, including a figure of Salome beneath the saint's feet and, most remarkably, a monumental Gothic arch composed of living oak trees, which frames the saint. The detail and semantic richness of this imagery make it practically certain that the drawing was made as a focus of devotion, probably for the manuscript's first recorded owner, the Oxford scholar-monk John of Lingfield.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Vision in the Anglo-Norman Voyage of Brendan

This paper considers the concept of vision as it is used in the Anglo-Norman Voyage of Brendan. It is concerned with sight, blindness and understanding particularly in relation to the supernumerary monks – those late-coming monks that join Brendan’s Voyage of Paradise, but do not succeed in their quest. The principal encounters are the appearance of the devil in the Deserted City, the damnation of the monk at the Smithy of Hell, and the third supernumerary who mysteriously vanishes after Brendan’s encounter with Judas Iscariot. The paper also discusses the blinding cloud on an Island of Three Choirs in the source material for the Anglo-Norman Voyage, which is the Latin Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis, which is the occasion where the second supernumerary leaves the cre

Volume 25, Number 1 - February 1947

Volume 25, Number 1 – February 1947. 58 pages including covers and advertisements. Editorial Doherty, R.E. The Beast O\u27Brien, John J. On Coffee Eagle, George L. A Stranger in Strasbourg Shanley, Joseph V. Reflections Doherty, R.E. Thoughts on New York Gnys, Edward L. Chaos Morrison, Coleman On Floorwalkers Eagle, George L. Moment of Vision Deasy, John Living History Fortin, Andrew G. Effects of Studying the Essayists Critiqu

Some Aesopic Fables in Byzantium and the Latin West: Tradition, Diffusion, and Survival

published or submitted for publicatio

Beast epic and beast fable in German literature

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe beast fable, which apparently originated in India, entered Germanic lands, through Latin writers, by way of Greece. A collection of beast fables, published by Heinrich Steinhovel in 1480, is one of the sources of those which in various languages are now called Aesop's Fables. The beast epic, however, bears the mark of the country in which it was written. The oldest recorded beast epic, the Ecbasis Captivi, was written by a monk of Lorraine in about 940. It is an allegory which portrays the authors regeneration after having strayed from the fold. The second Latin beast epic Ysengrimus, was written by a Magister Nivardus about two hundred years later. This poem, unlike the Ecbasis, is definitely satirical and uses the clergy as the butt of its satire. The next development of the beast epic occured in France between 1170 and 1250. Twenty-seven "branches" of the Roman de Renart came into existence during this period. In 1180, an Alsatian minstrel, Heinrich der Glichezaere, wrote the first High German beast epic, Reinhart Fuchs, based on "branches" of the Roman de Renart. The poem is permeated by ridicule, but behind the ridicule lies a bitter scorn for the corruption and ignorance inherent in human nature. A Flemish Van den vos Reinaerde, written by Willem, a poet of East Flanders, about 1250, and also based on some of the "branches" of the Roman de Renart is the source of all the Fuchs epics which have come down to us. The satiric and didactic elements which seem inseparable from the beast epic in all its forms, took an even more prominent place in a version published in Antwerp by Hinrek van Alkmar. This writer provided his version with a gloss in which the moral and religious bearings of the poem were set forth. This gloss is known as the Catholic gloss, to differentiate it from succeeding versions, beginning in 1539, which contained a revised gloss from the standpoint of the Reformation and called the Protestant gloss. The beast epic, with its capacity for satire, was used as a weapon for the Protestant cause during the Reformation. Writers such as Georg Rollenhagen and Wolfhart Spangler, who were familiar with the Fuchs stories used the ideas found therein in their own writings. Rollenhagen wrote a parody on Aristophanes Batrachomyomachia (the Battle of the Frogs and Mice), and Spangler used geese for his models in der Ganskonig. The beast fable also reached a high point in its cultivation through the efforts of Martin Luther, Erasmus Alberus, and Burkard Waldis. The polemics which these writers incorporated into their fables ·were also a potent force for the Protestant cause during the Reformation. Luther revised a collection of Aesopian Fables and included a preface for their use in teaching the young. Albertus Magnus and Burkard Waldis specialized in polemics against the Pope and Rome respectively. After the Reformation and during the Baroque period, the fable seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. It was not until the eighteenth century that it again came into its own, and very few writers who had not distinguished themselves as Fabulists, could venture to claim the honors of a literary man. The outstanding examples during this period were Christian F. Gellert and Gotthold E. Lessing. Gellert's fables which appeared in 1746 and 1748 were, with the exception of Luther's Bible, the most popular books in Germany. His fables show the influence of La Fontaine, but at the same time, his naive simplicity shows through whatever he appropriates. His artlessnes and ironical good nature can be observed in many of his fables. Lessing turned to the fable so seriously that he published a volume of fables, accompanied by a critical essay, in 1759. In this essay, Lessing sets up rules about the style, format, and treatment of the fable. He points out that the fable is not to be used as a medium of entertainment, but only to present a moral. By thus circumscribing the fable with various rules and regulations, Lessing succeeded in stifling a pleasant form of entertainment and substituting a dull and spiritless form of literary endeavor

Inventing the Gothic Subject: Revolution, Secularization, and the Discourse of Suffering

In 1816, Byron\u27s Childe Harold bemoaned: What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?/The heart\u27s bleed longest, and but heal to wear/That which disfigures it (III, 84), a fitting expression of the culture\u27s fascination with psychic, emotional, and historical traumas. Felicia Hemans used these exact lines as an epigraph to her poem The Indian City in 1828, suggesting again the fascination with suffering that permeated the texts produced by this literary community