Search results for ""Author Martin Arnold""

Dragons are a global phenomenon, one that has troubled mankind for thousands of years. From the fire-breathing beasts of North European myth and legend to the Book of Revelation’s Great Red Dragon of Hell, from those supernatural agencies of imperial authority in ancient China to those dragon-women posing a threat to male authority, dragons have a wide variety of forms and meanings. But there is one thing they all have in common: our fear of their formidable power and, as a consequence, our need to overcome them, to appease them or in some way to assume their power as our own. How can this be explained? Is it our need to impose order on chaos in the person of a dragon-slaying hero? Is it our terror of Nature unleashed in its most destructive form? Or is the dragon nothing less than an expression of that greatest and most disturbing mystery of all – our mortality? Martin Arnold traces the history of ideas about dragons, from the earliest of times to Game of Thrones, and asks what exactly it might be in our imaginations that appears to have necessitated such a creature.

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Essays on the continuing power and applicability of medieval images, with particular reference to recent films. The middle ages provide the material for mass-market films, for historical and fantasy fiction, for political propaganda and claims of legitimacy, and these in their turn exert a force well outside academia. The phenomenon is tooimportant to be left unscrutinised: these essays show the continuing power and applicability of medieval images - and also, it must be said, their dangerousness and often their falsity. Of the ten essays in this volume, several examine modern movies, including the highly-successful A Knight's Tale (Chaucer as a PR agent) and the much-derided First Knight (the Round Table fights the Gulf War). Others deal with the appropriation of history and literature by a variety of interested parties: King Alfred press-ganged for the Royal Navy and the burghers of Winchester in 1901, William Langland discovered as a prophet of future Socialism, Chaucer at once venerated and tidied into New England respectability. Vikings, Normans and Saxons are claimed as forebears and disowned as losers in works as complex as Rider Haggard's Eric Brighteyes, at once neo-saga and anti-saga. Victorian melodramaprovides the clichés of "the bad baronet" who revives the droit de seigneur (but baronets are notoriously modern creations); and of the "bony grasping hand" of the Catholic Church and its canon lawyers (an image spread in ways eerily reminiscent of the modern "urban legend" in its Internet forms). Contributors: BRUCE BRASINGTON, WILLIAM CALIN, CARL HAMMER, JONA HAMMER, PAUL HARDWICK, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, GWENDOLYN MORGAN, JOANNE PARKER, CLARE A. SIMMONS, WILLIAM F. WOODS. Professor TOM SHIPPEY teaches in the Department of English at the University of St Louis; Dr MARTIN ARNOLD teaches at University College, Scarborough.

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