Legendary Tales Research Articles

Scots Law and Scottish Identity: A Legendary Tale

The Treaty of Union 1707 between Scotland and England and the respective implementing legislation in each Kingdom contained provisions which today we might describe as ‘opt-outs’. These opt-outs from incorporating Union preserved aspects of the Scottish legal system which, along with the Presbyterian religion and the system of education, helped to ensure that Scottish identity was supported by some of the most powerful aspects of the state. This essay will examine some of the provisions of the Treaty, analyse aspects of the legal system and law that persisted after the Union, comment on the extent to which 310 years of the Union with England influenced that law, reflect on membership of the EU and the harmonization which it brought to the legal system and consider the impact of the Scottish Parliament on that law and legal system.

Triumph of the Rajput: Sanjay Leela Bhansali and the fascist aesthetics of Padmaavat

Abstract Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat (2018) re-tells the legendary tale of the Rajput queen Padmavati. In recounting this tale, Bhansali hews to the historic, Manichaean dichotomization of Hindu and Muslim, presenting Rajputs as entirely noble figures and Muslim invaders as essentially barbaric. Employing Susan Sontag’s and Frank Tomasulo’s theorizations of the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, this article examines how Bhansali glorifies the Rajputs’ purported history via his fascist aesthetics. Such an approach rearticulates history as myth and presents it as a form of theatre. This article analyses Bhansali’s use of such aesthetics to reenact the Manichaean framing of Hindu–Muslim relations, which reaffirm contemporary chauvinistic formulations of the (Hindu) nation. In the process, Bhansali’s film can be seen as lending support to the ideology of contemporary fundamentalist Hindu forces.

Weird Naturalism of the Brothers McKenna

When Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis performed the so-called “Experiment at La Chorrera” in Columbia in 1971, they staged what became one of the most legendary and storied trip tales in contemporary psychedelic culture. This paper diagrams the matrix of Jungian alchemy, Marshall McLuhan, and science fiction that underpinned the protocols and conceptual apparatus of the Experiment. These ideas are tied to McKenna’s early unpublished text Crypto-Rap, which is briefly summarized as an example of “weird naturalism.” In essence, it is argued that Terence and Dennis McKenna “esotericized” media theory into an occult apparatus of resonance, sympathy, and apocalyptic ontology.

Leaping eels electrify threats, supporting Humboldt’s account of a battle with horses

In March 1800, Alexander von Humboldt observed the extraordinary spectacle of native fisherman collecting electric eels (Electrophorus electricus) by "fishing with horses" [von Humboldt A (1807) Ann Phys 25:34-43]. The strategy was to herd horses into a pool containing electric eels, provoking the eels to attack by pressing themselves against the horses while discharging. Once the eels were exhausted, they could be safely collected. This legendary tale of South American adventures helped propel Humboldt to fame and has been recounted and illustrated in many publications, but subsequent investigators have been skeptical, and no similar eel behavior has been reported in more than 200 years. Here I report a defensive eel behavior that supports Humboldt's account. The behavior consists of an approach and leap out of the water during which the eel presses its chin against a threatening conductor while discharging high-voltage volleys. The effect is to short-circuit the electric organ through the threat, with increasing power diverted to the threat as the eel attains greater height during the leap. Measurement of voltages and current during the behavior, and assessment of the equivalent circuit, reveal the effectiveness of the behavior and the basis for its natural selection.

The cruces gemmatae of Oviedo between the eleventh and twelfth centuries

ABSTRACTTwo early medieval jewelled crosses are preserved in the treasury of the Cathedral of Oviedo. The first, known as the Cross of the Angels, was donated by King Alfonso II in the year 808. The second, the so-called Cross of Victory, was given as a gift to the Cathedral by King Alfonso III in 908. The original function of these crosses remains unknown, as the early medieval sources are silent on the subject. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that the earlier of these two crosses was displayed on the main altar of the Cathedral of Oviedo before the twelfth century, while it seems likely that the second cross functioned as a processional cross. Around the turn of the twelfth century, the bishops of Oviedo began to develop a propagandistic programme using a series of old objects that were incorporated into new discursive contexts, in particular the corpus of texts redacted by Pelayo of Oviedo (1089–1153), consisting of the Liber Testamentorum and the Corpus Pelagianum. From this point on, the crosses became the stars of a series of legendary tales, whose enduring popularity has helped preserve these objects. This article reviews the historiographic process by which the first of these two crosses was transformed into acheiropoieton, and the second, into a Christian battle standard at the Battle of Covadonga.

Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation. (first paragraph)

Utopian Visions and the American Dream

Utopian narratives express a universal yearning for a better human society in response to each author’s perception of malfunction and malfeasance in his or her own society. The earliest one of which I am aware (other than the legendary folk tale of the Garden of Eden) is Plato’s Republic. I review and comment on selected utopian literature from Plato to the modern American dream and a humanist vision for a global social order. To its authors, utopian visions are not mere wishful thinking, but societal policy declarations that at least in principle can be implemented, if only in part.

Grappling with Respect: Copway and Traill in a Conversation that Never Took Place

AS TO GHOSTS OR SPIRITS they appear totally banished from wrote Catharine Parr Traill in what has become one of Canadian literature's most infamous statements. Here there are no historical associations, no legendary tales of those that come before us. Fancy would starve for lack of marvellous food to keep her alive in the backwoods.... No Druid claims our oaks; and instead of poring with mysterious awe among our curious limestone rocks, that are often singularly grouped together, we refer them to the geologist to exercise his skill in accounting for their appearance; instead of investing them with the solemn characters of ancient temples or heathen altars, we look upon them with the curious eye of natural philosophy alone. (128) This statement from Traill's The Backwoods of Canada, an epistolary account of traveling to and clearing a farm in the 1830s near what is now Lakefield, Ontario, is an archetypal passage in one of the most reprinted books in the canon of early Canadian literature. This passage is a classic statement by a new arrival of how difficult it will be for an immigrant populace to forge a literature in a new land. The colony's first English writers must start from zero, from scratch, since they do not have access to a pre-existing local tradition. In the absence of already existing myth and history, they must build a foundation based upon unsuperstitious reason and scientific observation. The great irony in Traill's words is also archetypal because, of course, there are historical associations and legendary tales that are well known to the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg inhabitants of the Pamashkodeyong-Nogojiwanong region where Traill and her husband have come to homestead. (1) Indeed there exists a remarkable opportunity for her to learn about them when she passes through Pamashkodeyong (Rice Lake) in 1832. [B]eyond the Indian writes Traill, The missionaries have a school for the education and instruction of the Indian children. Many of them can both read and write fluently, and are greatly improved in their moral and religious conduct. They are well and comfortably clothed, and have houses to live in. But they are too much attached to their wandering habits to become good and industrious settlers. During certain seasons they leave the village, and encamp themselves in the woods along the borders of those lakes and rivers that present the most advantageous hunting and fishing-grounds.... Certain it is that the introduction of the Christian religion is the first greatest step towards civilization and improvement; its very tendency being to break down the strong-holds of prejudice and ignorance, and unite mankind in one bond of social brotherhood. (59-60) It is too bad that, pressed as they are to complete their long journey from England to their homestead, the Traills do not have time to stop in and actually visit the children in the Rice Lake School. Had she met the students there, perhaps direct contact with them may have modified her certainty that the benefits of civilization and religion would constitute a one-way transfer from the settlers to the Nishnaabeg. She could then have encountered one of the students named Kahgegagahbowh, who, under the English name George Copway, went on to publish several books detailing the history, tales, and spiritual traditions whose absence Traill laments. (2) Among the first indigenous people in North America to produce books in English, Copway was Nishnaabe from the very Michi Saagiig region that Traill details in her writings, and it is tempting to speculate about whether she might have met the young Kahgegagahbowh, if not in 1832 when she did not stop at the Rice Lake School, then in 1834 when she describes two visits to the winter and summer camps of the Nishnaabe hunter Peter Nogan and his family. (3) Perhaps Kahgegagahbowh, sixteen years old that year, was one of the young men practising tomahawk throws on the warm Sunday afternoon in June when she and her husband visited Peter's family--or better yet, perhaps he was one of the people she notices lying on blankets in the shade and reading (Backwoods 231). …

Ashes cricketers and the Lancashire League

Financed by the economic powerhouse of the cotton industry, the Lancashire League's member clubs had pre-League contact with the very first English and Australian Test match cricketers. Formed in 1890, the League went on to attract a multitude of Commonwealth stars, many of them ‘Ashes professionals’ whose League experience benefited themselves, their clubs and their communities. For some professionals, the League provided their bread and butter, for others an end-of-career payday, recuperation from injury or part of their cricket education. Some came at the height of their powers. Others appeared as substitute professionals. No other organization has provided its amateurs with the thrill, privilege and memories of sharing the stage with such a rich gallery of international sporting talent. The legendary tales of genius, competitiveness, charisma and showmanship have helped bond 14 clubs from north-east Lancashire together, their membership remaining unchanged since 1897.

La Doncella de Yue: fuente de la teoría de las artes marciales chinas

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0cm 0cm 6pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Maiden of Yue story is a short, legendary tale that describes the essence of Chinese martial arts theory. It is the earliest such description in Chinese history (written 25-220 C.E.) and has been quoted or paraphrased by other martial artists over the centuries, including Wu Yuxiang (1812-1880) (Xu, 1936: Part 3, 52), the first individual to compile and transmit what came to be known as Taijiquan theory. The story concisely describes both internal and external characteristics that combine mental and physical attributes and counter the fallacy of later artificial categorizations of the Chinese martial arts into Internal and External Schools. </span></span></span></p>

La collégiale Saint-Seurin de Bordeaux aux XIIIe–XIVe siècles et son élaboration d'une historiographie et d'une idéologie du duché d'Aquitaine anglo-gascon

Two texts in the municipal cartulary of Bordeaux – a description of Guyenne (or Aquitaine) and Gascony and the legendary tale of Sénebrun of Bordeaux – seem to have been developed in the Collegiate Church of Saint-Seurin de Bordeaux, according to the testimony of until now little-known manuscripts. This attribution is further confirmed by the fact that the two texts more or less openly use the thesis of the allodiality of Gascony, which was expressed for the first time by a dean of Saint-Seurin between 1294 and 1298. This Anglo-Gascon ideology, favorable to the kings of England, makes it possible to understand why there was a military parade for the Black Prince during his visit in 1355, just before he launched his expedition into Languedoc. The ceremony, suggested earlier by a Gascon embassy led by the young Captal de Buch, enabled the cohesion of the Anglo-Gascon union and the specific status of the Duchy of Aquitaine within the English crown to be affirmed.

Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's A Gossip's Story

In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good daughters of the British empire.

The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Home, and the Antebellum United States (review)

Richard, Carl J. 2009. The Golden Age of Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and Antebellum United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. $45.00 he. xiii + 258pp.A professor of history at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Carl J. Richard has written many books on importance of classical antiquity to historical development of culture. In this approachable, information-rich, and useful book, Richard takes reader on a brisk and thoughtful tour of numerous ways that classics informed and also shaped intellectual and cultural life of antebellum United States. Scholars of period will have frequent reason to consult and search through this work, filled as it is with a tantalizing assortment of thinkers making distinct uses of classics and instances in which classics seemed almost to have an independent life of their own in shaping of identity.While importance of classical Rome to nation's founders has been amply documented, what remains less discussed and, if anything, even more interesting is turn to ancient Greece - the Greek Revival - in antebellum period. In first chapter, Classical Conditioning, Richard discusses impact of classics on education, home life, and society. One of biggest shifts was that educators had increasing access to classical grammar books, anthologies, and dictionaries actually produced in United States rather than Europe. Replacing despised, clunky, and generally unhelpful anthology Graeca Majora, English-language edition of Friedrich Jacobs 's vastly superior Greek Reader became a widely used standard text. Another notable figure, Charles Anthon, a Columbia University professor of Greek and Latin who drew on German scholarship, published nearly fifty editions of classical texts (10). Enhancing fervor of New Hellenism was Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman Empire, which certainly caught imaginations of many. (I don't believe that Richard mentions this, but one of legendary tales attributed to Edgar Allan Poe about his own exploits was that he joined Greek army in his youth, a story that has never been substantiated, to say least.) One of benefits of Richard's perspective is that South doesn't get short shrift it so often does in cultural studies of nineteenth-century America. Richard sheds a great deal of light on importance of Greek revival to Southern culture, especially and unfortunately slavocracy.One of notable moments in study is Richard's discussion of key role classics played in intergenerational life of families. He charts importance of classics to Presidential family John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and then to his grandson, George Washington Adams. Throughout, Richard's touch is subtle: Masters continued to give their slaves classical names, though none named them Spartacus (32). The classics seeped into every aspect of culture, crossing class boundaries; foreign visitors were wonderstruck by fluency with classics evident even among yeoman laborers (40). As Richard observes, [throughout nation, from Canadian border to Gulf of Mexico, from Atlantic to Pacific oceans, state capitols, governors' mansions, courthouses, customs houses, colleges, banks, hotels, private homes, and even churches, synagogues, and jails were constructed in neoclassical form (35). The first major democracy of world history, fifth century BCE Athens loomed over developing United States: American statesman learned that they could make classical references before even least educated audiences and still be understood (41). Important to antebellum politicians, references to Athenian democracy allowed them to appear erudite without seeming aristocratic (46).The classics also crossed gender and racial lines. …

Aboriginal creative writing: a survey to 1981

Most Australians seem unaware of the extent and quality of Aboriginal literature. My survey focuses on creative writing in English as this has been an important expression of the political aspirations of the Aboriginal people, as well as a significant component of modern Aboriginal history. Aboriginal poets, playwrights, novelists and short story writers have been among the most articulate and influential of spokesmen in recent years; as Bernard Smith has observed, 'a few black writers ... are playing a leading part in developing a new awareness of nationhood among their own people'. Naturally much of what these authors write does not come under the rubric of creative writing. Aboriginal contributions in autobiography, biography, legendary tales and political discourse are by no means negligible. Indeed, the importance of these contributions deserves separate consideration. The tone of much Aboriginal creative writing is strongly political and increasingly it is standing on its own.merits as talented work. This article provides a brief overview of the past twenty years, attempts to analyse the past and present writing situation, and offers some tentative predictions for the future.

Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's <i>A Gossip's Story</i>

In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good d...

Entering a Bolted PlaceThe Navel of the Demoness: Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in Highland Nepal. By Charles Ramble. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

This is an extraordinary book. It is unconventional in its focus and original in the exposition of its subject matter; it is exemplary in its approach, combining philological investigation of written documents with personal observation of ethnographic detail; it enters unknown territory in its reflections and comes up with unexpected theoretical conclusions; and as a piece of writing, it has style, following its own flow from the title to the last line. The main title may sound sexy, but above all it leads directly to the central scene of action: to Te, or Tetang, an isolated village in the High Himalaya of southern Mustang. Certain topographical features of Mustang can be read, in illustration of a widespread legendary tale, as physical evidence of an epic duel between Guru Rinpoche, the ubiquitous disseminator of Buddhism in the Himalaya, and a local demoness called Balmo, who resisted his missionary activities in the area. The hegemonic battle ended, so the story goes, in victory for the saint, who completed his subjugation of the demoness by nailing her to the ground with a number of Buddhist edifices erected at key points on her prostrate body. One of these points was her navel (te or teba), where Guru Rinpoche built a stupa; topographically speaking, it is at the small plateau (thang) where the future village of Te-thang would rise. The cover photograph of the book exposes this navel, the fortified walls of Te, surrounded by parts of the demoness’s body, the high, curvy walls of the mountains around it. The color cover photo is repeated in black and white as a frontispiece, and the navel is also on the spine of the book. Thus illustrated, the title makes additional sense. Te is indeed embedded in a majestic physical environment, a landscape corpus of mythic suggestivity. This can be attested to by another book, Sacred Landscape of the Himalaya, coedited by Niels Gutschow, Axel Michaels, Charles Ramble, and Ernst Steinkellner (2003). Here, too, a view of the village is featured on the cover, and inside this picture book various portraits of

Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

In this compact and insightful book, Alejandro Madrid examines an elite group of early twentieth-century Mexican composers at a critical time in the nation’s cultural history, the 1920s. Focused principally on Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo, and Carlos Chávez, Madrid considers how these artists took part in a musical and intellectual dialogue aimed at determining what exactly nationalism and “modernity” meant musically after the revolution. For the author, these concerns became closely connected “as part of complex processes of power negotiation” (p. 3).Given the cataclysm of civil war and its aftermath, Madrid argues that the 1920s musical scene supported a complex, “multi-ideological” set of perspectives espoused by a number of individuals. In contrast to what ensuing canonical interpretations would attest, avant-garde composition and performance at this time was not necessarily or immediately realized in programmatic lockstep with the emerging revolutionary state. Instead, the author shows how composers “repositioned themselves within a changing society that contested pre-revolutionary ideology and social order and produced new institutions of power and codes for social interaction” (p. 4).Take the example of Julián Carrillo. Born in 1875, Carrillo was slightly older than either Ponce (1882 – 1948) or Chávez (1899 – 1978). Trained in European and particularly German music, Carrillo was a contemporary of Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker. Working with concepts borrowed from his European contemporaries, Carrillo infused them with his own ideas in seeking to create something new. Carrillo did not shy away from acknowledging his admiration for German music, and this did not ingratiate him with those who, in the growing nationalist fervor of the mid-1920s, increasingly criticized him. In fact, it was Carlos Chávez who turned out to be one of Carrillo’s most virulent antagonists as the two faced off in an exchange that took place in the pages of El Universal and La Antorcha in 1924, and later at the pivotal 1926 First National Congress of Music in Mexico City. Needless to say, Carrillo lost out to the younger composer’s more ideologically “correct” anti-European discourse, despite the fact that, as Madrid describes, Carillo was in the midst of developing an exquisitely modernist, microtonal system (“Sonido 13”), which quite possibly could have (and probably should have) gained him recognition not as a presumed “imitator” of European music but rather as an innovator in realizing a truly original, personal style.Ponce, as Madrid reminds us, has most often been incorporated into the official postrevolutionary nationalist discourse as an early promoter of Mexican folklore. Here, Madrid goes against previous considerations of the composer’s career to argue that modernist and nationalist aesthetics did not flourish at different “stages” of his professional life, in seeming contradiction, but rather were “continuously intertwined in his music, synthesizing in a style that combined traditional rhetorical elements often disregarded by Modernist composers with some of their preferred grammatical elements” (p. 84).Well known as an influential player in helping to crystallize what would later be identified as the official discourse about Mexican identity and culture after the revolution, Chávez was, in Madrid’s assessment, an important composer at “the intersection of tradition and modernity at a critical moment in Mexican history” (p. 125). Yet, in contrast to Carrillo and Ponce, it is Chávez who would prove most savvy in relation to the emerging postrevolutionary culture as he worked to position himself as a more authentic exponent of a new musical nationalism and as part of what the author terms a “hegemonic pact” eventually consolidated in the 1930s. Toward this end, Madrid’s fascinating chapter on the 1926 First National Congress of Music in Mexico City tells of “intense ideological exchange” representative of the larger “cultural and social crisis” occurring at the time (p. 112). Further, the author details the changing reception of Ricardo Castro’s 1900 opera Atazimba, a work based on a legendary tale of a Tarascan princess who falls in love with a Spanish captain. Here, Madrid tells how prerevolutionary ideas regarding Mexico’s native past could be, and sometimes were, “re-symbolized” to fit the new nationalist discourse. In the end, the author relates how Atazimba “could not transit that path [because] Castro’s opera was too heavy to sort through [that] kind of symbolic transition” (p. 153). Indeed, the making of this artistic history was not so much about revealing a “true” or “correct” interpretation of Mexican culture but rather exploring how the negotiation (even struggle, at times) between people espousing diverse ideological strains came to determine how and by whom the nationalist canon would be constructed. In the end, Sounds of the Modern Nation reveals much not only about the politics of culture but also about the often contentious process of writing national history.

`Thus I salute the Kentucky Daisey's claim': gender, social memory, and the mythic West at a proposed Oklahoma monument

On 22 April 1889, at the beginning of the first Oklahoma land run when the US federal government allowed non-Indian settlers to claim what had been Native American lands, Nannita R.H. Daisey entered the newly opened territory by train to become one of the very first women to stake a quarter-section land claim, on land today part of Edmond. According to local lore, Daisy leapt from the cowcatcher of the train to stake her claim, removing her petticoat to mark the spot. Over 100 years later Edmond has proposed a bronze monument to Daisey, petticoat flying, riding on the cowcatcher, in an effort both to attract tourists with public art, and to recognize women's contributions to Oklahoma settlement. On the surface this seems a laudable attempt to re-inscribe women's lives in the history of the American West, the social memories of Oklahomans, and the landscape of contemporary Edmond — except that the story about the cowcatcher and the petticoat, though passed down in local lore for more than 100 years, is false. And that, in turn, provides feminist historical geographers with an opportunity to examine the canonization of an exaggerated version of an already heroicized tale of Euro-American conquest, and what that implies for the representation of women in the American West. In this article, in an effort to improve upon decades of superficial scholarship, and in the face of the proposed monument's mis-portrayal, I attempt to detail Daisey's biography and describe her actual deeds. But, since the lives of prominent westerners are often difficult to disentangle from the powerful romanticizing influence of the mythic West on themselves and on their representations, my attempt itself raises issues about the study and representation of westerners in the US as the article explores ways that western women have been represented, the role of a monument as the landscape representation of a western woman, and the specific gendered spatial framework for the creation of contemporary social memory that Nannita Daisey's monument and legendary tale present.

The Animated Resurrection of the Legend of the White Snake in Japan

This article analyses and elucidates the factors involved in the animated reappearance of the Legend of the White Snake in Japan in the 1950s. Driven by the multiple demands of a new post-Second World War era in East and Southeast Asia, where the business of making new images was more urgent, profitable and competitive than ever before, the tale served both micro and macro purposes. Since the legendary tale was well known in the Chinese-speaking world and was initially a joint film project between Japan and Hong Kong, one would have expected the producers (Toei Animation Studio) to envisage the animated tale as primarily for Chinese audiences. However, the Japanese producers had, or later discovered, a wider hidden agenda in making the film that promised more lucrative and geopolitical rewards. Using the concept of ‘performativity’, this article interprets the course of the animated performance within several dimensions, and traces the history of the foundational role of Toei Animation Studio and its dream-making enterprise.

Book Review: Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines

Book Review: Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines