Popular Stories Research Articles

“The Devil Made Me Do It.” Popular Spirituality in a Rural Québec Parish, 1736–1901

This paper examines popular tales involving the Devil in the rural Québec parish of St-Joseph-de-Beauce, 70 kilometers southeast of Québec City. A microhistorical examination of the interaction between popular beliefs and clerical discourse in the parish over an extended period of time offers valuable insights into the functional details of the relationship between parishioners and curés that might otherwise be missed, misinterpreted, or even invisible at the diocesan level. Popular stories about Satan in Beauce County reveal how Catholicism intersected with popular belief systems in rural Québec. On the one hand, people’s fear of the Devil reinforced the clerical message that their spiritual needs took precedence over the inclinations of their bodies. But people also produced their own versions of the clergy’s construction of the Devil, and added content which often differed from the clerical version of Satan. Understanding the popular views of the Devil sheds more light on the ways that orthodox Catholic belief became blended with popular customs and tales, as well as how ordinary Catholics responded to the Church’s messages from the pulpit and in the confessional (or why they did not).

Love Incessantly Flows: Mae Naak, a New Asian Opera Heroine Born out of a Thai Buddhist Narrative

The folklore of Nak (Naak) or ‘Mae Nak Phrakhanong’ (Mother Nak of Phrakhanong District) permeates Thailand as the most popular story of a ghostly haunting. The story, originating in the nineteenth century, has been made into a plethora of versions including more than 20 film adaptations. My research focuses on the 2003 opera Mae Naak composed by Somtow Sucharitkul. The opera contains idiosyncratic traits different from other versions, which reflect Thais’ multiple feelings of horror, veneration and affection to Nak. Somtow creates a new Asian heroine in opera, who bears powerful emotions of love and desire to live, unlike the stereotype such as Madama Butterfly. The conclusion, however, does not define the emotional aspect of the story as merely the ignorance of impermanence and attachment. Instead, the narrative helps each individual to concretise and personalise the more abstract concepts of Buddhism. The opera depicts true love that continues through rebirths with her beloved in a karmic journey.

The Metamorphosis of Tianxian pei: Local Opera under the Revolution (1949-1956)

Since its consolidation in Yan’an in the early 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party has tapped into a rich repertoire of popular stories, imbuing familiar characters and narratives with new meanings ...

Solomon and Mythic Kingship in the Arab-Islamic Tradition: Qaṣīdah, Qurʾān and Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ

This article contrasts techniques from non-narrative, poetic and Qurʾānic texts with the narratives of Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (the Stories of the Prophets) in order to interpret passages on Sulaymān/Solomon in pre- and early Arabic-Islamic texts. Beginning with the renowned non-narrative Sulaymān passage in the pre-Islamic poet al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī’s ode of apology to the Lakhmid king al-Nuʿmān ibn al-Mundhir and several Qurʾānic passages concerning Sulaymān, the article compares these to the eminently narrative prose renditions of Solomonic legend that appear in Qurʾānic commentary and the (related) popular Stories of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ). I argue that verbal structures and rhetorical techniques characteristic of non-narrative forms such as poetry and the Qurʾān have the effect of preserving and stabilizing the essential panegyric (poetic) or salvific (Qurʾānic) message in a manner that the constantly mutating popular narrative forms neither strive for nor achieve.

Satan and Sitis: The Significance of Clothing Changes in the Testament of Job

This article examines the Testament of Job as a literary work within the genre of ancient Jewish novel. It explores the function of clothing changes for the two central characters of Satan and Sitis as providing both entertaining and critical narrative cues for character perception and development. This study is organized into two main sections. The first part examines the figure of Satan and his respective forms and disguises, with appropriate analogues to Apuleius's Metamorphoses. The second part examines Sitis's clothing and its function within the narrative, followed by a brief comparison to Joseph and Aseneth and Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe. This article contends that clothing is an important literary motif for the Testament of Job much like the popular ancient stories of Joseph and Aseneth, Chaereas and Callirhoe, and Metamorphoses. The contention is that a character's exterior clothing often indicates his/her inward character, or depicts a character's transformation within the narrative. In this sense, Sitis's clothing signals both her fall and eventual vindication, and Satan's disguises signal his status as the evil trickster. A character's change of clothing, as one would imagine in a performance or play, offers critical narrative cues to the reader.

《海光文藝》與香港六十年代的流行小説

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 本文主要分析香港20世紀六十年代的一本重要左派文藝刊物《海光文藝》中的流行小説。之前對《海光文藝》的研究主要在於它作爲左派的灰色刊物在冷戰時期的意義，本文則對其中的流行小説部分進行細讀，大致分爲兩個部分，第一部分討論《海光文藝》中對流行文學的研究，包括梁羽生、金庸對於武俠小説的討論，盈若思對瓊瑤及郭良蕙的言情小説的分析等。第二部分以文本細讀的方法，分析《海光文藝》刊登的流行短篇小説，特别是選取鄭慧、依達、亦舒這三個分别在五十年代、六十年代及七十年代最爲流行的言情作家作品來討論他們所寫作的言情小説中所反映的不同世代的創作特色。文章認爲《海光文藝》在評論及創作兩個方面均對當時的流行文學研究做出貢獻。它以一種嚴肅的、論文探討式的方式來分析時下的流行文學類型，同時，在創作上，刊物中發表的流行文學在世代、性别、背景上也有多樣化的特點，因此在香港六十年代流行文學的研究及創作上具有重要價值。
 This paper discussed the popular fiction in Haiguang wenyi, one of the most important literary journals by the leftist in the 1960s Hong Kong. Previously the studies of this journal mainly focused on its significance as a grey journal of the leftists during the cold war, this paper, however, conducted a detailed analysis in its texts of popular fiction. It consisted two parts. Part one discussed the essays on the theory of popular literature published in this journal, including discussions on martial art fiction by Liang Yusheng and Jing Yong, the analysis by Ying Ruosi on the topic of romances of Qiong Yao and Guo Lianghui. Part two did a detailed readings of the popular fiction in this journal, especially the stories written by Zheng Hui, Yi Da and Yi Shu. These three writers were the most popular romance writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s each. In general, this paper argued that Haiguang wenyi contributed greatly to the popular literature writings in the 1960s Hong Kong literature. Not only did it take a serious attitude to treat popular literature at that time, but also the popular stories published in this journal exhibited the diversity of genres and generations at that time.

Contrasting colonisations: (re)storying Newfoundland/Ktaqmkuk as place

ABSTRACTThe island of Newfoundland/Ktaqmkuk is the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq and Beothuk people. However, this truth is rarely acknowledged in the official and popular stories of the island as place. In Newfoundland, dominant stories construct a particular sense of the island as place, which often work to displace and ignore the histories and experiences of Indigenous Newfoundlanders, especially the large population of Mi’kmaq people living on the island. They also displace and ignore the role that settler Newfoundlanders play in perpetuating the colonisation of Indigenous peoples on the island. This article asks how including the story of settler colonialism in dominant understandings of colonialism can unsettle the official and popular stories of Newfoundland as place and homogenous characterisations of Newfoundland identity in the island’s cultural memory. It explores points of intersection between these two understandings of colonialism in three historical periods, including Newfoundland’s time as a British colony, the process of joining Canada and the post-Confederation period. Without including settler colonialism, vital understandings of these events and their consequences for Indigenous peoples are rendered invisible. The framework of comparative colonialisms creates a starting place for building authentic and accountable solidarities between Indigenous and settler Newfoundlanders.

Early Identification of Personalized Trending Topics in Microblogging

Social media has become a primary platform for the spread of information. Trending topics, which are breaking news and immediately popular stories, have become an attractive data source facilitating the spread of emerging issues. Motivated by the diverse trending topics covering from sports to politics, it is essential to help users find personalized trending topics. Since a topic in social media may start trending and get obsoleted quickly, the personalization would be more valuable to a user if the trending topic can be recommended before it is outdated. In order to identify personalized trending topics at an early stage, we propose to identify and exploit the auxiliary information. In particular, through collectively modeling content of similar users with social network information, we identify additional past contents that can enrich the training data of trending topics and users. The key insight is that though most posts of a user may be irrelevant, a few key posts can be signals revealing interests towards a particular topic. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively personalizes trending topics when they just start trending.

Not just a pretty face: Women as storytellers and subjects in the folktales of Northern Sudan

Like fairytales in many other cultures, the folktales of Northern Sudan are not only reflective of the deepest aspects of culture, but also major formative influences on it. However, a central and often overlooked feature of these stories is the role women played as narrators and performers, and the related centrality of female figures within the narrative. In most of the popular stories, the heroine is the one who has all the action, and is not just the pretty girl who awaits her prince. In fact she is self-sufficient, and it is the handsome and valiant prince who figures as an extra. The heroine is always intelligent, resourceful, wily and at times even brutal, but is she who saves the day and performs the needed tricks to save lives and conquer evil. It is only then that she is rewarded with the handsome prince as her prize. It looks like the perfect revenge of women against a patriarchal society which denies them such roles.

Intertekstualiteit en modernistiese kompleksiteit in Henriette Grové se Linda Joubert-romans

Henriette Grové debuted in 1947 as an author of popular stories in women’s magazines under the pseudonym Linda Joubert. Meulenhof se mense and Die laat lente appeared in the nineteen-fifties in Sarie Marais and were published in book form in the early nineteen-sixties. Although the author expressed her opposition to an evaluation of these popular romantic tales as part of her literary oeuvre, the two novels reveal a surprising complexity and density as regards both content and narrative structure which strongly link them in theme and technique to her recognized literary oeuvre, so that the two novels emerge as worthy literary texts in their own right after all, while they clearly function within the conventions of the genre of the romance novel. The novels also reveal an impressive range of sophisticated literary allusions which further characterize them as modernist.

Coire agus Coin-Shìdh am Beàrnaraigh

A re-telling and short discussion of the popular story ‘The Tale of the Cauldron’ as told by the author’s grand-uncle in Bernera, Lewis – a story in which the protagonist is pursued by fairy dogs. This is followed by a place-name story, which the author heard from Iain Mac Coinnich (Iain Dhòmhnaill a’ Phìobair), also of Bernera, concerning Creag ’Ille Chaluim Ghlais, a fairy dwelling-place which was – according to the storyteller – the last place in which fairy dogs were ever seen.

Top 10 Eos.org Articles of 2016

From habitable zones around aging stars to anomalies in a stratospheric wind pattern, here's a list of some of last year's most popular stories.

A Popular Buddhist Story at the Ming Court of the Early Sixteenth Century: Images of Miaoshan in the Monastery of the Great Wisdom in Beijing and Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain

This paper analyzes early illustrations of the Miaoshan story, which served a popular hagiography of Bodhisattva Guanyin — the murals of the Hall of the Great Mercy of the Monastery of Great Wisdom in Beijing (ca. 1513) — in relation to the vernacular narrative of performative nature, the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain. These murals, though they have not received much attention from scholars so far, are noteworthy as the whole ensemble of this monastery was commissioned by Zhang Xiong, a powerful eunuch of the Zhengde court. This paper clarifies the source of the subject of these murals with the use of newly discovered textual materials, and also tries to contextualize them in the cultural life of eunuchs. Such analysis also leads to redefining the status of precious scroll literature, which, though written in vernacular language, was also used in the higher stratum of society, and entered the Ming inner court in the fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries.

Contact Zones: Humans, Horses, and the Stories of Marguerite Henry

This article focuses on the novels of an award-winning author whose popular horse stories have nonetheless been largely disregarded by children’s literature scholars. Taking issue with the anthropocentric frameworks used by many to dismiss the horse story genre, the article argues that Marguerite Henry’s novels foreshadow the concerns of contemporary posthumanists such as Donna Haraway. It thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship exploring the ways in which children’s animal stories reimagine human subjectivity by highlighting interactive and interdependent forms of embodiment and being.

Civil War Incarceration in History and Memory: A Roundtable

Civil War Incarceration in History and MemoryA Roundtable Chris Barr, David R. Bush, Michael P. Gray, Evan Kutzler, and Kelly D. Mezurek May 1864. A group of men from Connecticut found themselves at a place that shook them to the core and traumatized their very identities. Robert Kellogg grasped a pencil and a small diary to chronicle the moment he arrived at Andersonville: “As we entered the place a spectacle met our gaze which almost froze our blood, our hearts failed us as we saw what used to be men now nothing but mere skeletons covered with filth and vermin. God protect us! He alone can bring us out of this awful mess.” Another Connecticut man peered inside the stockade to see the “horrors of horrors,” a scene that made his blood curdle. Ira Forbes, another brave member of the 16th Connecticut, had seen his fair share of horror. Antietam and Fredericksburg, with their bounties of death and destruction, seemed like mild prequels to what was inside a wooden stockade in rural Georgia. “Of all places of distress and misery and suffering which I have ever seen,” Forbes said, “this was the worst.”1 The experience of Civil War incarceration altered the lives of thousands of men. The stories of terror and loneliness, of physical and emotional trauma, bear out yet one more tragic chapter in the nation’s tale of war and woe. For this special issue of Civil War History, we have invited five leading scholars of Civil War prisons. Academic historians, public historians, and archeologists continue to collaborate to resurrect the stories of those who spent a transformative period locked away [End Page 295] from the outside world. Our hope is that this roundtable will shed light on the interdisciplinary nature of studying Civil War incarceration as well as provide some glimpses into where the field has come from and where it is headed. Chris Barr (CB) is a park ranger with the National Park Service at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Previously, he was on the interpretive staff at Andersonville National Historic Site, where he developed a variety of educational programs both for school groups visiting the site and for teachers to use in the classroom. He also oversaw the interpretive operations of the park’s social media and Web presence, including the production of the popular Story in Stone series that highlighted burials in Andersonville National Cemetery. His research at Andersonville focused on the interplay between race and captivity, a topic he presented on at the 2014 Society of Civil War Historians Conference. David R. Bush (DB) is professor of anthropology at Heidelberg University and director of their Center for Historic and Military Archaeology. Bush has been involved with the investigations of the Johnson’s Island Civil War Military Prison site since 1988. Although trained in prehistoric archaeology, he has dedicated the past twenty-eight years to historic archaeology, bridging the historical record with those cultural materials left behind. His most recent book on Johnson’s Island, I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011), details one man’s experience through letters to and from his wife, contextualized with other historical and archaeological data. Michael P. Gray (MG) is professor of history at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in American history, including a special topics course on Civil War prisons and the home front. His first book, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), was a finalist for the Seaborg Award. Gray is finishing an edited volume, Civil War Prisons II: Trending Captivity in Blue and Gray, and working on a full-length treatment on the Johnson’s Island Prison. Gray has won internal and external grants relating to the prisons, including Civil War Prison Archeology: Team Teaching Public History on Johnson’s Island (2011) as well as the National Prisoner of War Grant, Andersonville, Georgia (2014). Evan Kutzler (EK) is assistant professor of U.S. and public history at Georgia Southwestern State University, ten miles south of Andersonville, the largest and most infamous Civil War prison. In addition to writing and teaching...

MY READING HABIT

3 6 Y M Y R E A D I N G H A B I T P A U L A M A R A N T Z C O H E N I was a great childhood reader. Between the ages of seven and seventeen, my nose was always in a book. This was viewed as a sign of unusual precocity, and I received much acclaim for it from my parents and teachers. Looking back, however, I realize that I began reading by default and continued doing so out of habit. The philosopher William James wrote insightfully about the role of habits in our lives. He explained that we form habits through practice but that they eventually become embedded in our character: ‘‘So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves,’’ he wrote. Our habits, in short, are us, and my reading habit helped make me who I am. Habits form for many reasons, but often because they are useful in some immediate, often primitive, context. Was my childhood reading habit the result of my being hungry for knowledge? No. I read because I was a self-conscious and anxious child; books were soothing forms of escape. As a teenager, I lacked athletic acumen and had problems with my skin, not to mention my hair; it seemed safer to stay inside with a book than to display my imperfections to the world and be picked last for the team. 3 7 R My parents, children of Jewish immigrants, had jettisoned the old-world Bible in favor of secular literature. They saw my reading as what James would call a ‘‘moral habit,’’ and allowed me to skip meals and bypass chores when I was engaged in it. ‘‘Lower your voice; Paula is reading,’’ I would hear my mother whisper as I lay stretched out on the couch engrossed in, say, The Old Curiosity Shop or the third volume of The Forsythe Saga. I was applauded if I finished a book, especially if the book was long and a classic. Such reverence for what felt like a pleasure, if not an indulgence, was an incentive for me to read more. The books that fed my reading habit fell within the tradition of the English domestic novel – those nineteenth-century tripledeckers that ended with the hero and heroine united in perfect harmony. The promise of a final clinch (not always represented, but all the more satisfying in being left to the imagination) was what kept me reading. These books were romances in the narrow definition of the word – love stories. The term romance has a broad as well as a narrow definition. The Romance languages – French, Spanish, and Italian – are derived from Latin, the language of the Church and of erudition, but used for everyday life and for popular story and folklore. As the novel emerged as a genre in the eighteenth century, romance became a≈xed to a combination of the mundane colloquial and the idealized make-believe (the word for novel in French is roman and in Italian romanzo). Henry James (William’s younger, novelwriting brother) explained the amalgam in his preface to The American: ‘‘The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know sooner or later. . . . The romantic stands . . . for the things that . . . only reach us through the beautiful subterfuge of our thoughts and our desire.’’ Novels are the place where the real and the romantic meet and are interwoven. The books that constituted my reading habit were, as I said, love stories, but they were also romantic in the sense James described : they drew on a world that was recognizable in its broad outlines but arranged to produce an idealized, emotionally satisfying conclusion. In this sense, they were not so di√erent from the romantic adventure stories that fed my husband’s reading habit. He, like me, had read voraciously growing up, but where my favored stories culminated in the heroine’s marriage, his led to the 3 8 C O H E N Y hero’s triumph over physical obstacles and fierce adversaries. Our respective tastes conformed to...

Ancient origins of caesarean section and contextual rendition of Krishna’s birth

<p class="abstract">A Caesarean section is defined as “the surgical termination of pregnancy or delivery by operative opening of the uterus”. Caesarean sections ancestory can be traced back to the ancient (Graeco-Roman) world. Though there is very little information still extant about practices of this kind in antiquity, there are many folktales and popular stories from all over the world that tell of people being born in this fashion. Indian religious books describe the birth of Buddha through his mother’s right flank. Brahma was believed to be born through the umbilicus of his mother. Sage Sushruta, a founder of ancient Hindu medicine mentions the importance of performing a post-mortem caesarean section in his medical treatise “Sushruta Samhita”. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that knowledge and practice of this type of procedure was practiced in ancient Greece, ancient Rome and even ancient India. It is these early practices, from this part of the world, which are thought to have formed the foundations for what is known today in the modern Western medicine as the “caesarean section”. Therefore it is paramount to explore the practices and trace the history of this nature in the in more detail<span lang="EN-IN">. </span></p>

Staff gossip tells managers what's really going on.

'Gossip helps keep patients safe and organisations healthy, study claims' was the headline in our most popular online story of the past week. Perhaps it's no surprise that an item on gossiping got our readers talking.

Systems thinking in 21st century: a call to health promoters

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“Komedi within Komedi”: Moving Pictures and Intermedial Crossings in Turn-of-the-Century Colonial Indonesia

In the past thirty years studies of early cinema, mostly focusing on the history of film production and exhibition in the West, have been preoccupied with examining the emergence of moving images within their intermedial sphere. The case of moving picture exhibition and consumption in turn-of-the-century colonial Indonesia, with its rich selection of itinerant indigenous and Western amusements on offer, thus presents an especially intriguing case. This article situates itself within this transnational stream of commercial entertainments, known in Malay by the generic term komedi. In the process, it examines stories adapted across different media and cultural contexts, which were consumed by local audiences of various ethnicities and social standing in colonial society, specifically highlighting the conditions that led to an exceptional 1906 local film production of the popular folklore story of Nyai Dasima. While no known footage from this production survives, this paper proposes an intermedial reconstruction by looking at surviving traces of the text in other turn-of-the-century media forms. By exploring the re-incarnations of Nyai Dasima, alongside other popular stories shared across media platforms in colonial Indonesia, the article fleshes out how early entrepreneurs of moving pictures were utilizing intermedial connections in order to embed the new medium within the local media landscape. Conversely, by drawing on contemporary newspaper reports in Dutchand Malay, this article aims to show that local spectators made sense of the new medium of moving pictures through negotiations with and in relation to established entertainment forms they were habituated in.