Blowing the Morte: The Rites of Manhood in William Rayner\u27s \u3ci\u3eStag Boy\u3c/i\u3e

William Rayner’s young adult novel Stag Boy (1972) is often discussed in surveys of children’s literature as a classic title, but it has received little probing critical attention. This article argues that the novel uses its narrative of a boy’s psychic association with a giant stag as an allegory for the transition from boyhood into manhood. In a detailed close reading of the novel, and following the model of the love chase of medieval romance, it is shown how the author borrows key elements from folklore (the shaming ritual of the stag hunt), myth (Herne the Hunter), and quest romances (the motif of the joust) to develop a highly symbolic tale of mental growth and triumph over limitations. This makes Stag Boy a key text in the literary tradition that uses the theme of animal metamorphosis as a trope for addressing the conflicts of male adolescence

Introduction

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Pandaemonium: Ken Russell's Artist Biographies as Baroque Performance

Ken Russell (1927-2011) was a renegade talent and the self-styled enfant terrible of British cinema. His legacy as a film-maker consists of a large number of films on the lives of artists, mainly composers. But Russell’s approach to artist biography was highly unorthodox: rather than reconstruct a factual account he offered a deeply personal interpretation of artists’ lives based on his own understanding of their work. In a programmatic text for his film on Mahler (1974), Russell explained that his films ‘evolve through a stream of consciousness in which the man and the myth, the music and its meaning, time, place, dream and fact all flow and blend into the mainstream of the film itself’ and that ‘my film is simply about some of the things I feel when I think of Mahler’s life and listen to his music’.This book is an attempt to explain what that statement means and to unpack its implications for the practice of life writing. It takes a baroque approach to performance and performativity to show how Russell not simply made highly inventive films on other artists, but also constructed those films as a kind of self-portrait. Russell’s work then becomes a performance of self through art. In four chapters of detailed analysis this book reconstructs Russell’s method, from the very first films he made for the BBC in the early 1960s through his major feature films of the 1970s and 1980s.Doctorat en Histoire, histoire de l'art et archéologieinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

School for scandal : the erotics of progressive education in Gie Laenen’s juvenile novels

This article examines three novels by the popular Flemish youth author Gie Laenen, written between 1975 and 1982, in which the theories and practices associated with progressive education in the 1970s are key elements of the narrative. It argues that Laenen, who was convicted in 1973 and again in 2008 of serial sexual abuse of teenage boys, used progressive education as a narrative trope both to suggest to his young readers that close attachments between young boys and adult men were harmless and to provide an exculpatory defence for his own acts. Through narratological analysis and a contextualisation of the novels within the educational culture of the time, the article shows how Laenen – by drawing upon the ideas of progressive education, using these ideas to shape his narratives, and suggesting parallels between himself (as author) and several main characters – effectively appropriated the ideals of progressive education for ulterior purposes to justify his own abusive behaviour

Biting Back: Safe Space and Animal Desire in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008)

This article reads Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008) as an intervention in debates about safe spaces and teenage sexuality. I argue that the novel’s creation of a parallel universe in which characters are kept safe from sexual trauma functions as a critique of the notion of safe space, whereas the trope of animal transformation is used to address conflicting aspects of male teenage sexuality. Drawing on these themes, the novel formulates an alternative approach to the challenges of trauma and recovery that stresses strength and resilience, arguing that the hardships of reality must be faced head-on

Staging the World: The Devils as Theatrum Mundi

When Ken Russell's film The Devils was released in 1971 it generated a tidal wave of adverse criticism. The film tells the story of a libertine priest, Grandier, who was burnt at the stake for witchcraft in the French city of Loudun in the early seventeenth century. Because of its extended scenes of sexual hysteria among cloistered nuns, the film soon acquired a reputation for scandal and outrage. This has obscured the very serious political issues that the film addresses. This article argues that The Devils should be read primarily as a political allegory. It shows that the film is structured as a theatrum mundi, which is the allegorical trope of the world as a stage. Rather than as a conventional recreation of historical events (in the tradition of the costume film), Russell treats the trial against Grandier as a comment on the nature of power and politics in general. This is not only reflected in the overall allegorical structure of the theatrum mundi, but also in the use of the film's highly modernist (and therefore timeless) sets, in Russell's use of the mise-en-abyme (a self-reflexive embedded play) and in the introduction of a number of burlesque sequences, all of which are geared towards achieving the film's allegorical import