The Nail In The Skull And Other Victorian Urban Legends

Download or read book The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends written by Simon Young and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from “Beetle Eyes” to the “Shoplifter’s Dilemma” and from “Hands in the Muff” to the “Suicide Club.” While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives—particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends.

Download or read book The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends written by Simon Young (Historian) and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including "the Choking Doberman," "the Eaten Ticket," and "the Vanishing Hitchhiker." But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from "Beetle Eyes" to the "Shoplifter's Dilemma" and from "Hands in the Muff" to "the Suicide Club." While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives-particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends"--

Download or read book The Watkins Book of Urban Legends written by Gail De Vos and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and entertaining collection of urban legends from around the world, with a history and analysis of the origin of each tale, compiled by a leading authority in the field. A rich and unique collection of folktales and urban legends from around the world. Each story comes with an accompanying brief note to provide context. Including new tales reflecting new concerns; old tales repurposed for new audiences and new ways of telling. The collection illustrates that these stories are now alive across many new media. This is the first such popular book to bring together stories with both traditional and digital media origins and to examine how the phenomenon of social media has affected both the spread of urban legends and their very nature. Features the uniquely modern manifestation of folk mythology and legend, now made ubiquitous by the internet; the conspiracy theory. Includes urban legends such as: The Pickled Hand, The Babysitter, The Sandman. Includes conspiracy theories such as: Wild Fires, Fifteen Minute Cities and Organ Theft. 40% of the stories originate in North America, 30% in Europe, 20% in Asia, 10% in Africa and elsewhere The book also shows how stories spread and change from the country of origin to become global.

Download or read book Monumental Lies written by Ronald M. James and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A playful embrace of tall tales and exaggeration, Monumental Lies explores the evolution of folklore in the Wild West. Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West invites readers to explore how legends and traditions emerged during the first decades following the “Rush to Washoe,” which transformed the Nevada Territory after in 1859. During this Wild West period, there was widespread celebration of deceit, manifesting in tall tales, burlesque lies, practical jokes, and journalistic hoaxes. Humor was central, and practitioners easily found themselves scorned if they failed to be adequately funny. The tens of thousands of people who came to the West, attracted by gold and silver mining, brought distinct cultural legacies. The interaction of diverse perspectives, even while new stories and traditions coalesced, was a complex process. Author Ronald M. James addresses how the fluidity of the region affected new expressions of folklore as they took root. The wildly popular Mark Twain is often a go-to source for collections of early tall tales of this region, but his interaction with local traditions was specific and narrow. More importantly, William Wright—publishing as Dan De Quille—arose as a key collector of legends, a counterpart of early European folklorists. With a bedrock understanding of what unfolded in the nineteenth century, James considers how these early stories helped shaped the culture of the Wild West.

Download or read book The Boggart written by Simon Young and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A much-feared supernatural being from the north of England, the boggart survives against the odds whether in place-names or the pages of Harry Potter. Using long-forgotten sources, this ground-breaking book reveals that almost everything we thought we knew about the Boggart is wrong.

Download or read book The Boggart Sourcebook written by Simon Young and published by University of Exeter Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open Access - CC BY-NC-ND (4.0)

Download or read book The Boggart written by Dr. Simon Young and published by University of Exeter Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds it survives today, both in place-names and in fantasy literature—not least the Harry Potter universe. This book pioneers two methods for collecting boggart folklore: first, the use of hundreds of thousands of words on the boggart from newly digitized ephemera; second, about 1,100 contemporary boggart memories from social media surveys and personal interviews relating to the interwar and postwar years. Combining this new data with an interdisciplinary approach involving dialectology, folklore, Victorian history, supernatural history, oral history, place-name studies and sociology, it is possible to reconstruct boggart beliefs, experiences and tales. The boggart was not, as we have been led to believe, a ‘goblin’. Rather, ‘boggart’ was a much more general term encompassing all solitary supernatural beings, from killer mermaids to headless phantoms, from black dogs to shape-changing ghouls. The author shows how in the same period that such beliefs were dying out, folklorists continually misrepresented the boggart, and explores how the modern fantasy boggart was born of these misrepresentations. As well as offering a fresh reading of associated traditions, The Boggart demonstrates some of the ways in which recent advances in digitization can offer rich rewards.