Gillian Alban meticulously pursues the Fairy Melusine snake-woman image through the plot and the poetry of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession, into medieval legend, and beyond into her antecedents in ancient myth. The book describes the erotically inspiring force of Melusine's love story and draws parallels with goddesses such as Lamia, Ishtar or Inanna, Isis, and Asherah. Mother, creator, and leader, the figure of Melusine was ultimately vilified and tellingly converted into the demon of patriarchal accounts, as seen in the examples of Lilith, Medusa, Scylla, and the serpent in the Garden. Alban deconstructs part of Genesis, including the roles of Adam and Eve and Cain's crime, and illuminates the Old Testament worship of the goddess Asherah alongside the male Yahweh. A forceful exploration of literature, history, and myth, this study sweeps away limiting assumptions about the female sex. Melusine the Serpent Goddess restores the dignity acknowledged to women of old, making a forceful statement about the power and creativity of women.

What are myths and what are they for? Myths are stories that both tell us how to live and remind us of the inescapability and pull of the collective past. The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity explores the continuing power of primal stories to inhabit our thinking. An international range of contributors examine a range of texts and figures from the Bible to Cormac McCarthy and from Thor to the Virgin Mary to focus on the way that ancient stories both give access to the unconscious and offer individuals and communities personae or masks. Myths translated and recreated become, in this sense, very public acts about very private thoughts and feelings. The subtitle of the book, ‘Innovation, Singularity and Alterity,’ reflects the way in which the history of cultures in all genres is a history of innovation, of a search for new modes of expression which, paradoxically, often entails recourse to myth precisely because it offers narratives of singularity and otherness which may be readily appropriated. The individual contributors offer testament to the continuing significance of myth through its own constant metamorphosis, as it both reflects and transforms the societies in which it is (re)produced.

The Medusa Gaze offers striking insights into the desires and frustrations of women through the narratives of the impressive contemporary novelists Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Rhys and Michèle Roberts. It illuminates women’s power and vulnerability as they construct their own egos in opposition to their hostile alter egos or others facing them in their mirrors, and fixes a panoptic gaze on the women stalking its pages, as they learn how to deflect the menacing gaze of others by returning their look defiantly back at them. Some stare back and win assurance; others are stared down, reduced to psychic trauma, madness and even suicide. The book shows how Freud’s, Sartre’s and Lacan’s androcentric views define the Medusa m/other as monstrous, and how the efforts of mothers to nurture may be slighted as inadequate or devouring. It presents Medusa and other goddess figures as inspirational, repelling harm through the ‘evil eye’ of their powerful gaze. Conversely, it also shows women who are condemned as monstrous Gorgons, trapped in enmity, rivalry and rage. Representing English, American and African American, Canadian and Caribbean writing, the works explored here include realistic, social narrative and magical realist writings, in addition to tales of the past and dystopian narratives.

Mythology offers a set of cultural codes that have played an essential role in the construction of culture, social life, and identity for the entirety of human history. The transfer of mythological elements to humanity has been achieved through both oral and written narratives in literature. This volume compares the themes of mythological elements used in contemporary narratives with the motifs of classical narratives, and investigates the functions of those elements pursuant to semiotics and narratology.

Contemporary aesthetics is characterized by generic mixing on the level of both form and content. The barriers between different media and different genres have been broken down in all literary art forms, whether it be theatre, poetry, or the novel. While the publishing industry is increasingly keen to label novels according to genre or sub-genre (“Chick Lit”, “Lad Lit”, “Gay fiction”, “Scottish fiction”, “New Historical Fiction”, “Crime fiction”, “Post-9/11 Fiction”), the novel itself (and novelists) persist in resisting generic categorizations as well as inviting them. Is this a move towards a new artistic liberty or does it simply testify to a confusion of identity? The “aesthetic supermarket” evoked by Lodge in 1992 does indeed seem to sum up the variety of choices open to writers of fiction today and a literary landscape characterized by crossover and hybridization. The familiar dialectic of realism versus experimentation has segued into a middle ground of consensus which is neither radical nor populist, but both at the same time. The techniques of postmodernism have become selling points for novels, and the Postmodern Condition itself seems little more than a narrative posture marketed for an increasingly wide audience. Whether they have recourse to a “repertoire of imposture” (Amis, Self, Winterson), as Richard Bradford would have it (The Novel Now, 2007), in other words “the abandonment of any obligation to explain or justify their excursions from credulity and mimesis”, or, like the New Puritans, make use of narrative minimalism in order to foreground their own peculiarities, contemporary novelists consistently draw attention to the fundamental instability of narrative process and genre. The much-feared apocalypse of the novel has failed to take place with the arrival of the new millennium, but generic game-playing and flickering, narrative hesitation and uncertainty continue to pose the question of what constitutes a novel today and to challenge its identity in a world where all culture is increasingly public, increasingly contested and increasingly multifarious. Thanks to theoretical approaches as well as analyses of specific works, this collection of essays aims to examine the concepts of generic instability and cross-fertilization, of narrative postures and impostures, and their constant redefinition of identity, which contaminates the very concept of genre. It demonstrates the diversity of generic practices in the novel today and furnishes us with undeniable evidence of how generic instability is fundamentally constitutive of the contemporary novel’s identity.

In Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, editors Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes offer an invigorating international and interdisciplinary examination of the legendary fairy Melusine. Along with fresh insights into the popular French and German traditions, these essays investigate Melusine’s English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese counterparts and explore her roots in philosophy, folklore, and classical myth. Combining approaches from art history, history, alchemy, literature, cultural studies, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster theory, this volume brings Melusine scholarship into the twenty-first century with twenty lively and evocative essays that reassess this powerful figure’s multiple meanings and illuminate her dynamic resonances across cultures and time. Contributors are Anna Casas Aguilar, Jennifer Alberghini, Frederika Bain, Anna-Lisa Baumeister, Albrecht Classen, Chera A. Cole, Tania M. Colwell, Zoë Enstone, Stacey L. Hahn, Deva F. Kemmis, Ana Pairet, Pit Péporté, Simone Pfleger, Caroline Prud’Homme, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Renata Schellenberg, Misty Urban, Angela Jane Weisl, Lydia Zeldenrust, and Zifeng Zhao.

These essays offer scholars, teachers, and students a new basis for discussing attitudes toward, and technological expertise concerning, water in antiquity through the early Modern period, and they examine historical water use and ideology both diachronically and cross regionally. Topics include gender roles and water usage; attitudes, practices, and innovations in baths and bathing; water and the formation of identity and policy; ancient and medieval water sources and resources; and religious and literary water imagery. The authors describe how ideas about the nature and function of water created and shaped social relationships, and how religion, politics, and science transformed, and were themselves transformed by, the manipulation of, uses of, and disputes over water in daily life, ceremonies, and literature. Contributors are Rabun Taylor, Sandra Lucore, Robert F. Sutton, Jr., Cynthia K Kosso, Kevin Lawton, Evy Johanne Håland, Hélène Cazes, Alexandra Cuffel, Mark Munn, Brenda Longfellow, Gretchen Meyers, Sara Saba, Scott John McDonough, Etienne Dunant, E. J. Owens , Mehmet Taşlıalan, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, John Stephenson, Lin A. Ferrand, Paul Trio, Anne Scott, Misty Rae Urban, Ruth Stevenson, Charles Connell, Alyce Jordan, Ronald Cooley, and Irene Matthews.

This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt’s representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be inherently mythopoeic, or capable of restructuring the myth of the intellectual as male by default. This mythopoeia is, furthermore, intrinsically feminist in function, thus potentially broadening the conventional, limited view of women in intellectual history. The book will be the first study of Byatt’s work to examine this figure in detail, and the first study of women intellectuals in historical and literary discourse to apply concepts of mythopoeia and sexual difference in ways that allow new readings of women’s status and work in public spheres.

This comprehensive study of A. S. Byatt’s work spans virtually her entire career and offers insightful readings of all of Byatt’s works of fiction up to and including her Man-Booker-shortlisted novel The Children’s Book (2009). The authors combine an accessible overview of Byatt’s œuvre to date with close critical analysis of all her major works. Uniquely, the book also considers Byatt’s critical writings and journalism, situating her beyond the immediate context of her fiction. The authors argue that Byatt is not only important as a storyteller, but also as an eminent critic and public intellectual. Advancing the concept of ‘critical storytelling’ as a hallmark of Byatt’s project as a writer, the authors retrace Byatt’s wide-ranging engagement with both literary and critical traditions. This results in positioning Byatt in the wider literary landscape. This book has broad appeal, including fellow researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, plus general enthusiasts of Byatt’s work.

This volume provides sustained critical attention on Byatt’s wonder tales, both the stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, it examines Byatt’s claim that her wonder tales “are modern literary stories and they do play quite consciously with a postmodern creation and recreation of old forms” through a revisitation of the wonder tale in a productive dialogue with tradition as an expanded recognition of this fertile creative-critical dialogue with regards to the significance of the wonder tale in Byatt’s fictional work. The book evinces a fresh variety of conceptions and approaches to Byatt’s wonder tales, some spanning several tales and others focussing on a specific wonder tale, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story or novel and genre or tale, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches.