Academic literature on the topic 'Mermaids in fiction'
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Journal articles on the topic "Mermaids in fiction"
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Parrinello, Alice. "The Future is Collapsing: Feminist Narratives of Unmaking in Laura Pugno and Veronica Raimo." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 14, no. 2 (2023): 36–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2023.14.2.5017.
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While long ignored in the Italian panorama, in recent years science fiction and speculative fiction have seen a significant increase in the number of novels and critical analyses related to the two genres. Women writers are reclaiming a central spot in the fields in general, as exemplified by collapse and extinction narratives in particular. Laura Pugno’s Sirene (Mermaids, 2007) constitutes a significant example of such fiction. The work depicts a dystopic future, in which humans are facing extinction due to a dangerous cancer caused by pollution. While mermaids are immune to the disease, they are imprisoned by humans either for mermaid meat production or for sexual purposes. Veronica Raimo’s Miden (2018) has points in common with Pugno’s novel, even if from a (seemingly) utopian perspective. Miden is an ideal society that has flourished according to gender equality, happiness, and community principles. However, not too long after having moved there due to the economic (and moral) “Collapse” of their country, the main character and his partner are investigated by Miden’s society as the protagonist is accused of sexual violence. Both novels have been described by Marco Malvestio as eco-dystopias. Stemming from his definition, the paper investigates how both Sirene and Miden apply the concept of collapse as a key methodology in constructing their narratives. In this way, Pugno and Raimo collapse the human and nonhuman and the dystopia and utopia binaries. The paper argues that the authors follow a queer practice of unmaking theorised by Jack Halberstam, who stated that the only way forward is to unbuild, unmake, and collapse (2021).
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Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. "The Case of The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Childhood, Animality." Oxford Literary Review 41, no. 2 (2019): 238–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/olr.2019.0281.
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This article argues a different understanding to that in children's literature studies more widely of the implications of the work of Jacqueline Rose in The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984) for thinking about childhood, animality and children's literature and links these implications to the similar implications of Jacques Derrida's thinking about the child and animality. In both cases, the child and the animal are seen not as psycho-biological entities nor as products of social constructivism nor as categories that must be seen as inclusive of variety, but as memories, where memory is understood in the psychoanalytic sense as a present production of a past, including ‘observation’ as remembered. The implications of the arguments are demonstrated in relation to readings of Jessica Love's award-winning picture book Julián is a Mermaid (2018) as well as several reviews of the text in relation specifically to ideas of (trans) sexuality, gender, childhood, ethnicity and mermaids. Key here is what is understood to be the shared interest of psychoanalysis and deconstructive thinking in not stabilising definitions but instead in reading them as shifting in perspective.
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John, Stefanie, and Jennifer Leetsch. "Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments." Anglia 142, no. 1 (2024): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2024-0001.
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Abstract This research cluster offers four original case studies in Victorian and neo-Victorian ecocriticism. Clustered around the key concepts of form, materiality, and politics, its articles build on recent efforts by Victorianists to analyse interconnections of nature, agriculture, industry, and empire in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. The introduction first relates the cluster’s concerns to the latest scholarship in Victorian ecocriticism, and then turns to the aims and thematic focal points of the four contributions. The articles by Julia Ditter, Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Katharina Kalthoff, and Marlena Tronicke foreground the ecological project at the heart of a variety of fictional and nonfictional genres: the sensational novel, travel and nature writing, fantasy, and neo-Victorian gothic fiction. Ditter examines industrial travel narratives in the periodical press; Espinoza Garrido investigates the eco-colonial aesthetics of Florence Marryat’s sensation fiction; Kalthoff provides an ecofeminist reading of H. G. Wells’s mermaid tale The Sea Lady; and Tronicke examines material embodiments of the Irish Famine in the work of Paul Lynch. Together, these contributions offer fresh perspectives on the emerging field of Victorian ecocriticism and embrace the interdisciplinary dialogues facilitated by the environmental humanities for the study of nineteenthcentury literature and culture.
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Akifi, O. I. "Uniqueness of the interpretation of Slavic mythological images in the work of A.F. Veltman." Culture and Text, no. 51 (2022): 150–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.37386/2305-4077-2022-4-150-156.
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The article is devoted to the study of the unique features of traditional Slavic mythological images in the novels of A.F. Veltman. The combination of historicism and mythology in the works under consideration allows us to talk about the encyclopedism of works, as well as the formation of psychologism in Russian literature, about the beginning of the formation of Russian fantasy and fiction. This article considers three famous Slavic images in a unique interpretation: Koschey Immortal, mermaid Vila and Mokosh.
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Hayward, Philip. "Mer-Hagography: The Erasure, Return and Resonance of Splash’s Older Mermaid." Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, no. 11 (November 22, 2021): 139–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.10.
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The 1984 feature film Splash initially included a scene featuring an embittered, older mermaid (referred to as the “Merhag” or “Sea-Hag” by the production team) that was deleted before the final version premiered. Since that excision, the older mermaid and the scene she appeared in have been recreated by fans and the mer/sea-hag has come to comprise a minor element in contemporary online culture. The term “Merhag,” in particular, has also spread beyond the film, being taken up in fantasy fiction and being used—allusively and often pejoratively—to describe notional and actual female characters. Drawing on Mary Daly’s 1978 exploration of supressed female experiences and perspectives, this essay first examines Splash and associated texts with regard to the general figure of the hag in western culture (and with regard to negative, ageist perceptions of the ageing female), before discussing the use of “Merhag” and “Sea-Hag” as allusive pejoratives and the manner in which their negative connotations have been countered.
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Tierney, Scott. "Meat is Meat." After Dinner Conversation 5, no. 2 (2024): 59–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/adc20245216.
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How do we decide what meat is acceptable to eat? In this philosophical short story fiction, a crew of over a 100 are onboard a ship, and slowly starving. The captain is worried they might all starve before finding their way to shoreline. They try fishing off the side of the boat, the but seas are uncharacteristically empty, that is, until they net a mermaid. As the unconscious mermaid hangs upside down the cook, the captain, and key members of the crew try to decide what to do with her, or “it” as the captain prefer they call her. It’s unclear if she is able to speak or understand them, as she is unconscious. A few of the crew argue against eating her, or at least telling the whole crew about her and giving them each the choice. The captain, however, is unwavering and insists that “meat is meat” and they should get to work planning dinner.
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Taber, Nancy. "Le cochon, a washed up mermaid, and soldier’s bread: three generations of Acadian women at the intersection of museums and fiction." International Journal of Lifelong Education 37, no. 1 (2017): 4–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2017.1356881.
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White, Nick. "The Ventriloquial Paradox: George Steiner's ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.’." New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 1 (2002): 66–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x02000167.
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Surveying the intellectual passions and pursuits of a lifetime in his memoir Errata: an Examined Life (1997), George Steiner commented that ‘such was the response to The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. and to Alec McCowen's overwhelming interpretation on stage of the dominant figure that I could have made of the novel or novella my foremost business’. Adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed at the Mermaid by John Dexter in 1982, The Portage is the only example of Steiner's fiction to have been dramatized for the stage. Through the character of A. H., Steiner – Britain's foremost scholar, critic, and polemicist on the Shoah and European thought in a ‘posthuman’ era – proposes the metaphysical idea of ‘negative transcendence’ as necessary to any attempt to understand Jewish fate during the Holocaust, a perspective unique amongst dramatic representations seen in Britain. The play itself has not been produced on the professional stage in the following twenty years, and critics and commentators continue to be perplexed by Steiner's decision to present his arguments in such a fashion. Nick White argues that while the novel's weaknesses were mercilessly exposed by the ‘translation’ of Steiner's novel into the dramatic idiom of stage naturalism, it was the subsequent controversy which exposed as fundamentally flawed Steiner's attempt (through recourse to the ideas and language of his own critical writing) to construct a composite, ‘inter-textual’ identity for the character A. H. He goes on to show that the initial confusion became polarized around conflicting interpretations of Steiner's intentions: were the arguments advanced by A. H. to be understood as an accurate rendering, or a misinterpretation – by the master manipulator of language, A. H. – of Steiner's published theses about the compulsions upon which Jewish fate depended during the Holocaust?
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Walonen, Michael K. "Enrique Mendieta and the Ghosts of Leftism Past: The Aftereffects of Mexico’s Dirty War in Élmer Mendoza’s Detective Fiction." Latin American Perspectives 47, no. 6 (2020): 77–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0094582x20951790.
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The continuance of the revolutionary strife of Mexico’s dirty war into the present day, both as a legacy and in the form of its survivors, resonates strongly in the work of the novelist Élmer Mendoza. Mendoza’s early novel Janis Joplin’s Lover uses its protagonist to portray a 1970s Mexico torn between a revolutionary path of collective social amelioration and the corrupt, mercenary self-interest embodied by Mexican narco-traffickers, with the country pushed toward the latter through the repression of student activists by the Mexican state. Mendoza’s five subsequent novels that center on the exploits of detective Lefty Mendieta focus on the fallout from this period of repression, using the figure of Lefty’s brother Enrique, a former leftist guerrilla, to represent a lost (but not totally lost) egalitarian and socially just alternative to the neoliberal political economy that has ravaged the living conditions of most Mexicans for almost four decades. La continuada lucha revolucionaria en el marco de la guerra sucia que ha caracterizado a México hasta la hoy en día, tanto como legado a la vez que en la presencia de sus sobrevivientes, resuena poderosamente en la obra del novelista Élmer Mendoza. La primera novela de Mendoza, Janis Joplin’s Lover, utiliza a su protagonista para retratar a México en la década de 1970, dividido entre un camino revolucionario de mejora social colectiva y el corrupto y mercenario interés propio encarnado por los narcotraficantes mexicanos; el país se ve empujado en esta última dirección a través de la represión de los activistas estudiantiles por parte del Estado. Las cinco novelas posteriores de Mendoza, centradas en las hazañas del detective Lefty Mendieta, se centran en las consecuencias de este período de represión y emplean la figura de Enrique, el hermano de Lefty, un ex guerrillero izquierdista, para representar la pérdida (si bien no total) de una alternativa igualitaria y socialmente justa en oposición a la economía política neoliberal que mermado las condiciones de vida de la mayoría de los mexicanos durante casi cuatro décadas.
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Cantarela, Antonio Geraldo. "O SAGRADO NA CONSTRUÇÃO NARRATIVA DE MIA COUTO "The sacred on Mia Couto’s narrative construction"." PARALELLUS Revista de Estudos de Religião - UNICAP 5, no. 10 (2014): 191. http://dx.doi.org/10.25247/paralellus.2014.v5n10.p191-206.
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A obra do escritor moçambicano Mia Couto apresenta grande número de construções discursivas que podem ser associadas ao âmbito da religião e do sagrado. Tais marcas certamente poderiam ser abordadas por leituras teológicas ou das ciências da religião. Fugindo a esses vieses, o artigo propõe-se a destacar o modo como as referências ao sagrado “visitam” o texto do escritor, constituindo-o no literário. Metodologicamente, far-se-á a leitura de uma cena do romance O outro pé da sereia em diálogo com as categorias de Otto sobre o numinoso. Em vista de complementar tal perspectiva de leitura, serão lidos também dois contos, em correlação com o conceito de realismo maravilhoso: O embondeiro que sonhava pássaros e O dia em que explodiu Mabata-bata. Sob o foco da crítica literária, conclui-se que as sacralidades e hierofanias que transitam pelo texto de Couto se entendem como encenação e recriação literária do sagrado. Nas considerações finais afirma-se que o fazer literário que assume as vozes dos marginalizados, ainda que pelo caminho da ficção, pode ser acolhido como objeto de leitura teológica.Palavras-chave: Numinoso. Realismo maravilhoso. Teologia. Literatura.AbstractThe work by Mozambican writer Mia Couto shows a great number of discursive constructions that may be associated with the field of religion and the sacred. These features could certainly be addressed by theology or religious studies texts. In an attempt to run away from these perspectives, the goal of this paper is to highlight the way in which references to the sacred “visit” the writer’s text, making it a literary one. Methodologically speaking a scene from the novel The Mermaid’s Other Foot will be read in a dialogue with Otto’s categories on the numinous. In order to complement this point of view of the reading, two other short stories will also be read in relation to the magical realism concept: The bird-dreaming baobab and the The day Mabata-bata exploded. Using the literary criticism approach, the conclusion is that the sacralities and hierophanies present on Couto’s text are understood as the staging and the literary recreation of the sacred. The concluding remarks state that the literary doing in the marginalized voices, although it is done through fiction, can be seen as an object of theological reading.Keywords: Numinous. Magical Realism. Theology. Literature.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Mermaids in fiction"
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Lauppe-Dunbar, Anne. "Dark Mermaids." Thesis, Swansea University, 2012. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42723.
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Sporting success is defined by athletic prowess, mental stamina and the ability to win. The balance between winning by fair, or foul, means is an area of fierce debate. This thesis seeks to illuminate the workings of the former German Democratic Republic Doping Scam: (Theme 14.25); to shed light on the human tragedy of steroid engineering, and to explore, within a fictitious world, new ground in areas that have offered little in research. Dark Mermaids, a novel, presents a narrative through contemporaneous documentation of the experiences of a fictitious former Olympic GDR swimmer and a tenacious young girl. In parallel, the novel considers the idea of selective memory, the paranoia of life under a dictatorship, and the notion of 'home' in a divided country. The accompanying essay further explores, through example, the themes of amnesia and exile, and the theory that the common exilic pathology of strain and estrangement of flight is never, in practice, over. Synopsis of Novel 1990. The Berlin Wall has fallen. Police officer Sophia Kunstler slips through the backstreets of Berlin looking for sex in the arms of a cruel faced blue eyed stranger; the same boy she has found in clubs and dance halls over many years. Outside her apartment a cold and frightened girl waits with a letter. Dagmar, Sophia's mother, is dying. Sophia and her father must return to the former GDR, a place from which they had escaped. As part of her job, Sophia is required to investigate claims of Stasi collaboration in her former home town's local police force. Suppressed memories gradually surface, and these impel her to revisit the GDR elite sports training ground, where death, or a new life, await.
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Sarratt, Taylor. "MERMAID RUMSPRINGA." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/87.
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Mermaid Rumspringa is a short story collection that focuses primarily on female protagonists at different stages in their lives. It is an exploration into the effects society has on young people, the way in which mental health issues manifest in young minds, and the way the people who are closest to the individuals dealing with these issues try to adapt and understand them, and in some cases, completely ignore them. This collection utilizes magical elements to try and soften the blow of the serious issues that are being explored both internally and externally within each of the individual stories. These stories present as allegories, as well as classic story tropes with intricate twists and subversions, to make the readers uncomfortable within their comfort zones. As a whole, these stories fit in nicely within the speculative fiction spectrum, and they draw the attention of the average millennial.
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Molina, Maria de Fátima Castro de Oliveira [UNESP]. "A hipertextualidade em O outro pé da sereia: uma escrita em palimpsesto." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/144306.
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Previous issue date: 2016-08-29<br>O romance O outro pé da sereia (2006), do escritor moçambicano Mia Couto, evidencia na composição de sua estrutura uma proposta de revisitação do passado distante ou recente, por meio de uma escrita simbiótica em que poesia e crítica harmonicamente dão o tom do diálogo que a ficção instaura com eventos que marcaram a História de Moçambique. Nessa via de repaginação, o ficcionista adota como procedimento de escrita a inserção de elementos que têm significação extratextual na composição da trama romanesca. A partir dessa moldura enunciativa, este estudo investiga como se estabelece a relação de hipertextualidade entre o romance e o texto historiográfico da carta de Luiz de Froes de 1562. Com base na hipótese de que a narrativa em O outro pé da sereia constitui-se nos princípios da hipertextualidade, o foco da tese volta-se para a análise das conexões entre a construção estrutural da obra e o esquema de ação presente no texto historiográfico. O percurso investigativo adotado desenvolve-se com a análise dos recursos mobilizados para a configuração de tempos, espaços e personagens que estruturam o romance. O conceito de hipertextualidade, estruturado por Gérard Genette como o objeto de palimpsesto, será utilizado como aporte teórico para fundamentar o processo de derivação textual que se instaura entre os textos.<br>The structure of the novel The Mermaid's Other Foot (2006), by Mozambican writer Mia Couto, reveals a proposal for revisiting the distant or recent past. This is achieved through a symbiotic writing in which poetry and criticism harmonically set the tone of the dialogue established by fiction with events that marked the history of Mozambique. In this redesigning way, the fiction writer adopts as a writing procedure the insertion of elements which have extra-textual significance in the composition of plot. Based on this expository frame, in this study we investigate how the hypertextual relationship between the novel and Luiz de Froes´s 1562 historiographical text is established. Based on the assumption that the narrative The Mermaid´s Other Foot is constituted on the principles the hyper-textuality, our thesis focuses on the connections between the structural construction of the work and the present action scheme in the historiographical text. Our investigative route is developed with the analysis of the resources mobilized for the time, space and characters setting which shape the novel. The concept of hyper-textuality, structured by Gerard Genette as palimpsest object will be used as theoretical basis to support the process of textual derivation which is established between the texts.
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Wakeling, Solomon. "Believing in mermaids : the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment." Thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:45607.
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The thesis is composed of two parts: Believing in mermaids—the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment: a critical and creative response and Believing in mermaids—the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment: a critical essay. The first part ‘The Cry of the Swan’ is a folktale composed by mermaids. It is known to have its origins in a human story of which all that survives is the title, The Suicide Kiss—the story itself having been lost to the sea. The tale has been known variously in other editions as The Call of the Siren (or The Siren Call), The Starless Pools, The Shy Water and The Unlit Lake. The version presented here is a re-translation of that tale from the mermaid tongue into English, based on mermaid engravings. It must be accepted that with each successive shuffle there have been losses and gains. The second part represents the fruits of an inquiry into literary method whose objective was to find a means of imparting the literary qualities common to the genre of literary fiction—such as the foregrounding of interesting language forms, cadence, specificity and complexity—to fantastic literature, using stories involving mermaids as a case study. Part I provides a comparative analysis of a group of three texts from the early 20th-century—The Sea Lady, The Sea Fairies and Wet Magic—which betray a tension between the realist and fantastic modes when telling stories involving mermaids and underwater worlds. In part II I propose a method of imparting the believability and “precision” of detail that Borges discusses (77) to an underwater fantasy world in which the physical environment renders most real-world details meaningless or absurd. This method entails an application and re-purposing of the theory of “functional equivalence” from translation theory and is based upon a utilisation of the writings of Umberto Eco. Part III will discuss the use of mistranslation as a model and other strategies for creating a dense, specific and richly-textured ‘other world’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
Books on the topic "Mermaids in fiction"
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(Editor), Jack Dann, and Gardner Dozois (Editor), eds. Mermaids! Berkley Publishing Co., 1986.
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ill, Johnson Steve 1960, and Fancher Lou ill, eds. When mermaids sleep. Random House, 2013.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Mermaids in fiction"
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Rosenberg, Rebecca. "Grottoes and Mermaids." In Women and Water in Global Fiction. Routledge, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429298837-5.
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Hallissy, Margaret. "Naming the Past: Lisa Carey’s The Mermaids Singing." In Reading Irish-American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781403983275_6.
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Gray, Amber. "Fathoms Below: An In-Depth Examination of the Mermaid in Young Adult Literature, 2010–2015." In Beyond the Blockbusters. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496827135.003.0004.
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In response to the rise of young adult paranormal romance in the mid-2000s, more than thirty young adult novels with mermaids as central characters (many of which belonged to multi-volume series) were published between 2010 and 2015.This chapter investigates the complex history of mermaids in fiction, examines the figure of the mermaid and the protagonist’s position between worlds in mermaid-themed young adult novels, and explores how mermaid characters illustrate the possibility of identity and the body as characteristics potentially capable of transformation.
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Rose, Lucy Ella. "Feminist Readings and Poetic Paintings." In Suffragist Artists in Partnership. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421454.003.0007.
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Chapters 6 and 7 are linked in their exploration of artists’ readings, literary sources and subjects, and in their focus on paintings of women and water: from the drowned ‘fallen woman’ in George’s work to the empowered mermaids in Evelyn’s work. Chapter 6 explores the Wattses’ private library, their conjugal reading practice, and Mary’s engagement with contemporary feminist writers and writings, before discussing George’s series of female-focused social-realist paintings inspired by poetry, in order to show how the couple engaged with, were inspired by, and contributed to early feminist literary and visual culture. It focuses specifically on Mary Watts’s readings of early feminist writings and on George Watts’s paintings provoked by articles and contemporary debates on ‘fallen women’, female suicide and the exploitation of women. The author aims to show how the Wattses were influenced by writers engaging with issues at the heart of Victorian feminism, and to reveal Mary’s interactions with writers of New Woman fiction. This further reveals the Wattses’ progressive socio-political positions, and especially Mary’s keen – if largely private – interest in early feminist writing and culture during her marital years, to which she more actively contributed in widowhood.