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Werewolves In Storytelling
I’ve previously taken a close look at wolves in literature, specifically in children’s stories. Werewolves are a separate archetype from wolves and play a different storytelling role. In folklore and fairytale, werewolves are lunar figures which stand in for cyclic time, alongside. dragons, serpents and related creatures. THE HISTORY OF WEREWOLVES IN A NUTSHELL Werewolf literally means ‘Man Wolf’. Were…
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Free Radicals by Alice Munro Short Story Analysis
My reading of “Free Radicals” by Alice Munro (2008) is highly metaphorical. To me, this is a story about the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, and the new vulnerability older women feel when their male partner dies before them. Read literally, though, and this is the story of one woman’s brush with a serial murdering intruder — a rare crime story…
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A Very Brief History Of Science Fiction
WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION? Along with fantasy, horrors and Westerns, science fiction is one of the highly metaphorical categories of story. THE UNIVERSAL EPIC Science Fiction is about human evolution, literally the universal epic. Science fiction stories often use the myth form, not only because myth is about the journey but also because myth is the story form that explores…
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The Symbolism of Stairs And Attics
STAIRS Common-sense lives on the ground floor […] on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space See Symbolism of the Dream House for more on stairs and the places they connect. Beauty and the Beast Stairs = Ascent To Heaven This image is from the 1986 version retold…
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How To Write Powerful Metaphor
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended lectures on chemistry to expand his ‘stock of metaphors’. Quite Interesting Around 1 in 8 words (i.e., 12,6% of all words) across different genres is used metaphorically. Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Metaphors help readers see…
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Black Dog by Pamela Allen Analysis
Black Dog by Pamela Allen (1991) is about a girl who actually neglects her dog, but learns not to by the end. A few weeks ago I took a close look at the much more recent picture book with a similar name, Blackdog by Levi Pinfold. In that, I interpret the black dog as agoraphobia or a similar mental illness…
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Intertextuality of Into The Forest by Anthony Browne
Into The Forest by Anthony Browne is story book, part ‘toy book’. Young readers learn to look at pictures and search for intertextuality, as each illustration links to a well-known fairy tale. This makes the book popular for classroom use, along with the Shrek films and modern stories with fairy tales as ur-texts.
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Homes and Symbolism In Film and Literature
Homes are an outworking of the characters who live inside. Sometimes, in fiction, the house even seems to come alive in its own right.
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Symbolism Of The Dream House, Cottage, Bungalow and Cabin
House symbolism is an interesting way of looking at a story. Have you noticed that houses as depicted in Western picture books tend to look the same? Two storied, bedrooms upstairs, slightly untidy but still Pinterest-worthy? There’s a reason for this. Each part of a house is symbolically unique. Gaston Bachelard talks about this in his famous book on architecture and philosophy, The Poetics of Space.
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Making Use Of The Miniature In Storytelling
Stories featuring vast size differentials are as old as storytelling itself. These differentials can be created in various different ways, and are much utilised across children’s stories in particular: Go back far enough in time, and the tiny human was not fictional, but real in the collective imagination. A tiny human was known as a ‘homunculus‘, which means a very…
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Allegory Equals Extreme Metaphor
Allegory means, among many other things, that the characters, worlds, actions and objects in a work of fiction are highly metaphorical. That doesn’t mean they aren’t unique or created by the writer. It means the symbols have references that echo against previous symbols, often deep in the audience’s mind. Allegorical also means ‘applicable to our modern world and time’. Good…
