Explore the vast range of titles available.

Monstrous Beings of Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the 21C revitalization of “folk” as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received. While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk “horror” travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.

In Indian Caribbean folklore, a churile is the spirit of a woman who has died while pregnant or during childbirth. She is a ‘jumbie’ in limbo between the natural and supernatural realms. This article traces the migration of churile folklore from South Asia to the Caribbean and examines its relevance in Indian Caribbean culture today. I highlight how embodiments and evocations of the churile have been reinterpreted to navigate intergenerational trauma and reimagine Indian Caribbean femininity. Using four key examples — Vanessa Godden’s performance film Churile (2016), Sabiyha Rasheed’s song ‘Choorile’ (2020), Kevin Jared Hosein’s short story ‘Maiden of the Mud’ (2016) and Ryan Persadie’s drag persona Tifa Wine in his ongoing Coolieween project — I discuss how the churile becomes a potent symbol for confronting the legacies of indenture. These works transform the horrifying symbolism of the churile, using her to address historical and personal wounds, while expressing resilience and reclaiming agency, underscoring the enduring relevance of embodied experiences in shaping complex identities.

The first extended study of supernatural discourse in Old English poetry, Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse fills a conspicuous gap in the scholarship of early medieval literature. Drawing insights from various disciplines, including critical discourse analysis, social psychology, and oral poetry studies, Supernatural Speakers demonstrates how and why three poets—the poets of Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A—marshalled their distinction as experts of the Old English poetic medium to perform the power of supernatural speech by means of masterful poetics. By offering new analytical paths through these early medieval poems, Supernatural Speakers elucidates the importance of poetics as a critical window on the social and religious functions of verbal art in early medieval England.

This volume presents new research in medieval conceptions of magic, science, and the natural world, bringing not only medicine but also meteorology and navigation into the discussion. Ground-breaking theoretical chapters on theology, natural sciences, and the writing of history are presented by established experts in their fields. These are accompanied by case studies of interactions between magic, science, and natural philosophy. Each chapter offers new findings while contributing to a comprehensive survey of the shifting boundaries between natural and supernatural across both space and time. Emerging areas, such as the study of prognostics, are represented by challenging new work. This collection will prove fascinating to everyone engaging with this expanding field.

People mystically explained many events and phenomena that they could not explain, claiming that sometimes celestial events, sometimes animals, and sometimes people had supernatural powers. In folk narratives such as legends, anecdotes and memorates that have been passed down from word of mouth to the present day, some extraordinary situations of some individuals who are considered to be saints are discussed. In this context, the main purpose of the study is to compile the narratives around Abdurrezzak, whose tomb is in Ağrı province and is believed to be a Sayyid among the public. For this purpose, first of all, the terms memorat, legend and hagiography were emphasized, then information about Seyit Abdurrezzak was given and the narratives compiled with the interview technique as a result of the field study were written down. As a result of the research, 22 narratives were compiled and it was concluded that 8 of these narratives could be considered as legends, 5 as legends and 9 as memorates.

ABSTRACT The 1:720,000 map ‘A New and Extensive Geographical Description of Supernatural Phenomena in Polish and German Pomerania’ (POMERANIÆ POLONICÆ ET GERMANICÆ PHÆNOMENA SUPERNATURALIA NOVA ET EMPLA DESCRIPTIO GEOGRAPHICA) presents the spatial distribution of supernatural beings along the Polish-German borderland. Depicted phenomena include devils, spirits, wild hunters, gnomes, will-o'-the-wisps, giants, dragons, mermaids, ghosts, werewolves, apparitions, and nightmares, based on the 19th and 20-century folkloric sources compiled into a geospatial database. The map combines GIS and linocut techniques with graphic symbols inspired by Renaissance cartography, including decorative cartouches and vignettes. Integrating modern cartometric methods with traditional styles, the map is both artistic and rich in information on cultural beliefs, blending historical and contemporary cartography for a unique perspective on folklore in this culturally diverse region.

Heroic images appear in ancient myths, legends, or folktales from almost every corner of the world. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung proposed the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes in the early 20th century, and his hero archetype has inspired numerous literary critics, mythologists, and writers to investigate the narrative structures of the hero’s journey. The 18th century witnessed a boom in British Gothic novels and Chinese supernatural tales, among which Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi are the most prominent. Both literary genres belong to supernatural fiction, with the hero being the typical character. Based on archetypal criticism and qualitative approaches like comparative method, historical approach, and textual analysis, this study attempts to compare the heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction, revealing the resemblance and diversity of human cultures through the analysis of the heroes’ characteristics and journeys in The Castle of Otranto and Liaozhai Zhiyi. The findings show that their heroic images are created by the hero archetypes from their national mythologies and social contexts, which demonstrates the transformation from the extraordinary to the ordinary. Plain language summary Heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century Supernatural Fiction Shift from Extraordinary in Mythology to Ordinary in Literature This study aims to explore the heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction. Why was the study done? Heroes are important characters in mythology and literature. Many scholars study the implications of hero myths and heroic images from the perspectives of psychology, mythology, and literature. The analysis of heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction could provide a cross-cultural view of hero studies. What did the researchers do? The authors summarized the famous British and Chinese hero myths, the social contexts of the 17th and 18th centuries, and analyzed the relationship between the heroic images in literature and the hero archetypes in mythology, using The Castle of Otranto and Liaozhai Zhiyi as representative supernatural novels in 18th-century Britain and China. What did the researchers find? Through the comparison of heroic images, the different cultures between Britain and China were discovered. The heroic images in literature are the “displacements” of the hero archetypes in mythology. What do the findings mean? Findings show that hero archetypes are similar across cultures and that human civilizations in different regions have commonalities. The different heroic images reflect different cultural and social contexts. From the mythological heroes of noble origins to the ordinary human heroes in 18th-century literary works, heroic images are increasingly close to the everyday lives of human beings.

This article focuses on the figures concerning experiences of and beliefs in possible contacts with the dead amongst Icelandic people that have come to light from three national surveys that were undertaken in 1974, 2006–2007, and 2023, focusing in particular on the most recent figures. It starts by reviewing the earliest evidence of such beliefs in Iceland (expressed in both Old Icelandic literature and Icelandic folk legends), which evidently laid down the foundations for modern-day beliefs. After listing the main findings of the surveys and noting the changes in belief that appear to have taken place over the last 50 years, the article offers some brief conclusions relating to what seems to have caused not only some obvious gender and age differences in belief and experience, but also differences in figures between urban and rural areas.

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival – such as predators, protectors, and prey – but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.

The first extended study of supernatural discourse in Old English poetry, Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse fills a conspicuous gap in the scholarship of early medieval literature. Drawing insights from various disciplines, including critical discourse analysis, social psychology, and oral poetry studies, Supernatural Speakers demonstrates how and why three poets - the poets of Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A - marshalled their distinction as experts of the Old English poetic medium to perform the power of supernatural speech by means of masterful poetics. By offering new analytical paths through these early medieval poems, Supernatural Speakers elucidates the importance of poetics as a critical window on the social and religious functions of verbal art in early medieval England.