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This article examines Yeats’s broad use of Irish folklore between 1888 and 1938, and attempts to find a justification for his contention that his own unique metaphysical system expressed in both editions of A Vision, itself an outgrowth of his three decades of ritual practice as an initiate in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, could somehow function as both an interpretation and enlargement of “the folk-lore of the villages”. Beyond treating Irish fairy stories as a way for Yeats to establish his own Irishness, capture what remained of “reckless Ireland” in its twilight, or create a political counter-discourse set against English hegemony, the immutability and immortality of the sídhe are considered in light of the assertions of several minor lectures from the Golden Dawn. This connection sheds new light on Yeats’s ideas about Unity of Being, and hypothesizes a possible esoteric path to “escape” from his system of phases so as to resolve the body-soul dilemma evident in his poetry.

Even when Yeats sought exterior validation, his methods were sometimes rather slipshod. [...]in his excitement over finding apparent corroboration for what would become the central trope for A Vision (1925), his vision of \"a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star\", Yeats was blatantly duped by William Sharp (Yeats, Autobiographies 280; Yeats, Later Essays 14). Through the special blending of Irish and occult lore, Yeats could attain a subject matter both unique and of general validity. [...]his three interests [the literary, political, and philosophical] became - at least in his poetic theory and practice - unified, for his art was the expression (as Pater required) of his personality, the expression (as Irish nationalism demanded) of the Irish mind, and a method of buttressing and extending (as Blavatsky and [MacGregor] Mathers urged) the teachings of theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and cabalism. [...]fifteen years after formally resigning from active participation in the Stella Matutina (the schismatic successor of Mathers' original Golden Dawn), Yeats closed nearly two decades' work on A Vision with the lament: \"It seems as if I should know all if I could but ... find everything in the symbol. [...]they take the supernatural events so much for granted that they seem advocates for Evans-Wentz's view in The FairlyFaith in Celtic Countries: \"If fairies actually exist as invisible beings or intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for nothing that exists can be supernatural\" (xxiv).

What activities did the women of ancient Greece perform in the sphere of ritual, and what were the meanings of such activities for them and their culture? By offering answers to these questions, this study aims to recover and reconstruct an important dimension of the lived experience of ancient Greek women. A comprehensive and sophisticated investigation of the ritual roles of women in ancient Greece, it draws on a wide range of evidence from across the Greek world, including literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and vase-paintings, to assemble a portrait of women as religious and cultural agents, despite the ideals of seclusion within the home and exclusion from public arenas that we know restricted their lives. As she builds a picture of the extent and diversity of women's ritual activity, Barbara Goff shows that they were entrusted with some of the most important processes by which the community guaranteed its welfare. She examines the ways in which women's ritual activity addressed issues of sexuality and civic participation, showing that ritual could offer women genuinely alternative roles and identities even while it worked to produce wives and mothers who functioned well in this male-dominated society. Moving to more speculative analysis, she discusses the possibility of a women's subculture focused on ritual and investigates the significance of ritual in women's poetry and vase-paintings that depict women. She also includes a substantial exploration of the representation of women as ritual agents in fifth-century Athenian drama.

O artigo problematiza o papel das coleçoes fonográficas e uso de gravaçoes sonoras em pesquisas etnográficas. A primeira parte trata do impacto da invenção do fonógrafo em pesquisas etnográficas e investiga os diferentes sentidos atribuidos aos arquivos fonográficos pela antropologia e etnomusicologia. A segunda parte consiste num relato de pesquisa sobre o acervo fonográfico de Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo, formado entre 1942 e 1944, a partir de um projeto de documentação de \"música folclórica brasileira\" nos estados de Goiás, Ceará e Minas Gerais. A partir dessa experiencia de pesquisa abordam-se lógicas de colecionamento e metodologias em um projeto baseado em documentação fonográfica, nos anos 40, no Brasil, bem como os diferentes sentidos atribuidos a fonogramas de Luiz Heitor em circulação por contextos nao académicos.

During the nineteenth century, the mirror, revered as an object of fascination for centuries, assumed a distinct role as an icon of bourgeois self-consciousness. Not surprisingly, given its function as a class symbol, the mirror serves as the centerpiece of Hoffmann's 'Story of the Lost Reflection' (1815), which addresses the interplay between the artistic realm and the bourgeois world in aesthetic production. While most interpretations of the story suggest that the liberation of the artist figures reflection from the mirror's surface signifies his surrendered soul and fall from grace, this seemingly uncanny element, in fact, reveals the intricate connection between the fantastic and the everyday that forms the foundation of Hoffmann's poetics. Reprinted with the permission of Wayne University Press

Gingerbread represents just one of many food lures that are symbolically pervasive in folktales, fairy tales, and cautionary tales-one that can serve as analogous to all symbols of temptation in industrializing and consumerist cultures, representing the move in such cultural climates toward pacifying (or, better, `passifying') children by projecting agency onto the lures rather than onto the children themselves. Reprinted with the permission of Wayne University Press

First performed in 1854, this one-act fairy extravaganza by J.R. Planché is reprinted as an example of this overlooked Victorian genre and Planché's important contribution to the history of the fairy tale. Reprinted with the permission of Wayne University Press

Through a series of inversions of the structure and content of canonical European literary fairy tales, Bill Willingham's comic book Fables functions, at once, as parody, commentary, and as an ongoing fairy tale in its own right. The classic fairy-tale characters of the Grimms and Charles Perrault are given corporeal form—given sexuality and sensuality in the comic's pages—and through this transformation are reshaped into a refracting lens for the moral precepts of those collections. The result is a postmodern literary endeavor that is neither condemnation nor celebration of the material from which it draws, but something in between.

Best known for her political satire, experimental novels, and fantastic short stories, Kurahashi Yumiko was also the author of two collections of fairy tales. These tales, translated here into English for the first time, are both taken from Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults (1984). \"A Mermaid's Tears\" is based on Hans Christian Andersen's \"The Little Mermaid,\" while \"The Love Affair of Issun Bōshi\" is a retelling of the medieval Japanese tale \"Issun Bōshi.\" In their own way, both tales exemplify Kurahashi's contention that fairy tales are fundamentally cruel because they are governed by standards of retributive justice and didactic morals, and, in the case of her own tales, that they are for adults because their erotic nature might be considered too poisonous for children.