Journal articles on the topic 'Sword and sorcery'

The release of Conan the Barbarian (1982) played a crucial role in the emergence of the sword and sorcery film, a subgenre of fantasy cinema featuring muscular heroes in violent conflict with wizards and other supernatural creatures. Italian genre filmmakers attempted to capitalize on the international popularity of sword and sorcery by quickly producing a number of low-budget films, which emulated the stylistic and narrative features of Conan. Over a period of six years, between 1982 and 1987, the Italian film industry produced almost two dozen sword and sorcery films, which achieved mixed results at the box office. Although recently an increasing number of international film scholars have focused on the critical examination of Italian genre cinema, to date, little attention has been devoted to the study of Italian sword and sorcery. By examining the aesthetic features of four Italian sword and sorcery films (Gunan il guerriero [1982], Ator l’invincibile [1982], Hercules [1983] and The Barbarians [1987]), as well as their modes of production and distribution, this article proposes the first comprehensive critical examination of this filone.

Literary images and functions of death in sword and sorcery and mythopoeic fantasyThis article presents and compares methods of description of death in two primary variants of fantasy literature: sword and sorcery and mythopoeic fantasy. The focus is on works of the precursors of fantasy literature — Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian series and John R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, and texts of authors who creatively developed two primary types of fantasy literature — Fritz Leiber Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser cycle and Ursula K. Le Guin Earthsea cycle.The analysis is divided into two parts. The first one describes methods of presentation of death and their functions in sword and sorcery literature. In this variant of fantasy many literary images of death can be found, which focus particularly on its biological aspects. The next part shows analogical elements in mythopoeic fantasy, where the descriptions of death are inspired by the medieval chansons de geste.The article shows important differences between methods of presenting of death in sword and sorcery and mythopoeic fantasy and between functions of death in this two primary types of fantasy literature. In sword and sorcery the descriptions of death have great importance in the adventure plot structure, because they are connected with activities and adventures of the main character. In mythopoeic fantasy the kind of a character’s death often shows moral condition of this character. Moreover, death in mythopoeic fantasy is important for the balance and stability of created world.

The plot and the presented world of Robert Ervin Howard’s Beyond the Black River are representative of sword and sorcery, a subgenre of fantasy fiction that Howard is claimed to have pioneered. It has been proposed that the worlds in fantasy fiction are coherently organised, natural, and material. Nevertheless, supernatural elements that are not consis-tent with the structure of the universe are present. The struggle between the structured worlds and the chaotic supernatural that is resolved by an intervention of a barbarian hero constitute the essence of the sword and sorcery subgenre. These elements can also be found in Beyond the Black River by Howard, who employs contrastive images to present the super-natural.

Abstract Among the most prolific and consequential US writers, Samuel R. Delany has published novels and short stories, a magnificent autobiography, various memoirs of social commentary, extraordinary essays of literary theory and criticism, and numerous (written) interviews. However, it is his Nevèrÿon sword and sorcery series (1979-87) that he describes as his most ambitious narrative “experiment.” Occupying Delany for nearly a decade, Nevèrÿon’s singularity as a narrative experiment is not solely achieved in terms of its complex unfolding as a series, with each tale accumulating over four volumes into an astonishing ensemble of stories, images, and worlds. Beyond its unfolding and enfolding of tales and beyond its “play” at the “game” of sword and sorcery central to its fictional experiment is its commitment to the “paraliterary” construction of his text. Refusing the distinctions marked out by “literary” and “non-literary,” Delany uses a serial narrative platform to braid together philosophical discourses and genre elements into a theoretically complex textual ensemble that comes to include both the rupture of AIDS and of an AIDS-like epidemic into the ninth tale of the series, the novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985). Referring to it as his “novel of crisis,” Delany weaves New York City and the fictional world of Kolhari into what he calls “a document of our times,” opening sword and sorcery to a baroque discursive and rhetorical flux historiographically aware of itself both as a marginal cultural form and as a document of lives at the margins of a world-historic plague.

Abstract This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subsequent presentation of surplus populations, intricated “free” and slave labor, and the modes of racialized differentiation that shape and are shaped in the interstices of those social formations. In Delany's sword-and-sorcery bildungsroman, the models illustrate the abstract logic of value, show that logic to be informatic in character, and point toward a dialectical relationship between this informatic logic and the concrete practices of dispossession that produce and operate through ascriptive race and gender regimes. Value's abstract operations are too often understood to be incommensurable with such regimes, yet Delany's presentation deploys the language and processes associated with informatics to reveal an essential relationship between the abstract network that results from value's mediating function and the modes of ascription and concrete violence that, as a result of such mediation, tend to be associated with precapitalist or noncapitalist social formations.

Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series is the first Polish fantasy series that has gained so much popularity. When Sapkowski published his first story — The Witcher — in 1986, fantasy literature wasn’t well-known in Poland. In fact Polish readers, who were interested in fantasy, would mainly know John R.R. Tolkien’s novels like The Hobbit, Or Thete and Back Again, The Lord of the Rings or Silmarillion, all belonging to mythopoeic fantasy. Sapkowski’s story was vastly different from them, because the Polish author referred to sword and sorcery literature, which at that time was little-known in Poland. He created an interesting protagonist and a dark, vicious world, full of violence and graphic descriptions of death. It appears that one of the main factors having an influence on the huge popularity of the series, may be the attempt to shock the reader by using a unique construction of the presented world, which contains a lot of graphic violent imagery. This article presents those methods of description of death and violence in The Witcher series to present why they are so interesting to the readers and what makes them stand out from the rest of similar descriptions in Polish fantasy literature. The analysis is divided into several parts. The first part presents the influence of Sapkowski’s debut story on Polish fantasy literature. The second part contains the analysis of the dynamics of descriptions of death. The third and the fourth focus on showing the individualisation of death in The Witcher series and on detail exposure. The next part presents the narrative treatments used by Sapkowski to increase the impact of the literary images of death, for example changes of a narrative perspective. The last part of the article presents naturalistic elements of the descriptions and explains what functions they perform in the text.

Abstract: In this study, the author examines the literary landscape in Turkey given the new dimension opened by the vertical gradation of fiction. The division of literature into high literature (classic), middle-tier (Belles-lettres), and low-tier literature (for mass consumption) is becoming increasingly prominent. Belles-lettres seems to be the most mobile of those, with its representatives being able to, over time, find themselves both at the top and the bottom rung of this paradigm. Zülfü Livaneli's works straddle the line between the high literature and belles-lettres, while books by Barış Müstecaplıoğlu are a perfect example of mass literature becoming regarded as belles-lettres. Another productive approach is horizontal gradation – dividing modern Turkish literature into genres. This is especially true for mass literature, where a clear classification into genres and subgenres is pretty much a precondition for existence. The study singles out such genres of mass literature as detective novels, women's romance novels, and historical adventure novels. Speculative fiction occupies a special place in this, with its genre affiliation being a topic of major discussions. The Turkish literature of the 2000s features several principal genres of speculative fiction: sci-fi (K. Kutlu, G. Berkkan, H. Balçı) with alternative history being a part of such (G. Dayıoğlu, H. Kakınç); fantasy with its subgenres of urban fantasy (S. Yemni, S. Atasoy, G. Elikbank, F. O. Şeran, C. Yücel), "sword and sorcery" fantasy (B. Müstecaplıoğlu, A. Aras, G. Canbaba) and dark fantasy (S. Ersin, G. Öğüt), as well as the genre of dystopia (A. Şaşa). In conclusion, the author argues that analyzing literary pieces necessitates operating with both the vertical and horizontal paradigms simultaneously.

ABSTRACTSome villains in the anime Sword Art Online are influenced by the sorcerer archetype, drawn from legends of fairyland, medieval tales of hostile magicians, and the ancient figure of the shaman. The concentration of sorcerers in SAO makes it fertile ground for tracing the archetype in both Western and Japanese sources before turning to how SAO uses those influences in its world‐building and in the development of its own brand of sorcerer.

Introduction The Disney brand has become synonymous with magic through its numerous depictions of spells, curses, prophecies, and pixie dust. Thus, it is ironic that in 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Studio’s founding (“Disney History”), the final film released during Walt Disney’s life, The Sword in the Stone (celebrating its 60th anniversary) remains stuck in obscurity (Aronstein 129) despite being steeped in magic and wizardry. The Sword in the Stone is regarded as “one of the most obscure [films] in the Disney animated canon” (Booker 38). Although it performed moderately well during its debut in 1963, its 1983 re-release and home video sales failed to renew public interest. To date, The Sword in the Stone has no games, comic series, or even Disneyland merchandise (Aronstein 129). The film is hardly a technical marvel; its sketchy animation style and blue-slate backgrounds create a dingy, unfinished look (Beck 272), while its simplistic storyline and anachronistic humour have been criticised for being ill-matched with its Arthurian subject matter (Gossedge 115). Despite these flaws, The Sword in the Stone offers the studio’s most fully rendered representation of Disney magic as benevolent forces sourced in learning and discipline that enable good-hearted protagonists to prepare for future leadership roles. By approaching the film as a didactic text separate from its Arthurian origins, I will demonstrate how The Sword in the Stone defines magic, not by nebulous spells or hexes, but by its facilitation of societal advancement and transformative powers via the educated mind. Young Arthur’s Humble Beginnings Based loosely on T.H. White’s 1938 novel of the same name (Valle 224), The Sword in the Stone takes place in medieval Europe, with most of its action occurring in a rotting castle and surrounding wolf-infested forests. In this threatening world, magic takes many forms, from powerful acts of “sorcery” to comical displays of “Latin business”. The first allusion to magic occurs during the film’s opening song, which establishes its setting (“when England was young”) and primary conflict (“the good king had died, and no one could decide who was rightful heir”). Without a ruler, England will be destroyed by civil war unless miraculous forces intervene on its behalf. This ‘miracle’ is the eponymous sword in the stone that the rightful ruler of England will free. The sword is destined for King Arthur, but as he is only an orphaned child living in obscurity at the film’s beginning, no one manages to retrieve the sword in his stead, and so the ‘miracle’ seemingly fails. The film’s off-screen narrator describes this leaderless period as “a dark age … where the strong preyed upon the weak”. As a force that trumps brute strength, magic is prized by those who can wield it, particularly the wizard Merlin. Magic is regarded with suspicion by the majority who cannot practice it (Valle 234), though they still recognise its legitimacy. Even Arthur’s practical stepfather, Sir Ector, begs Merlin not to practice any “black magic” on his family after Merlin creates an indoor “wizard blizzard” to prove his seriousness in tutoring Arthur. Merlin is a far cry from the mysterious soothsayer of Arthurian legend. He has been Disneyfied into a caricature of the famed wizard, appearing more like an eccentric academic than an all-seeing mystic (Beck 272). Susan Aronstein describes him as “the reification of Disney’s post-World War II rebranding of itself as a leader in education in the wake of a postwar shift in American child rearing” (130)—a playful pedagogue who makes learning fun for Arthur and audiences. After meeting Arthur in the woods near his home, Merlin becomes determined to rectify the boy’s educational deficiencies. It is not yet clear whether Merlin knows who Arthur is or will become; Merlin merely repeats to his owl companion, Archimedes, that the boy needs an education—specifically, a modern education. In addition to presenting Arthur with evidence of his travels to the future, such as helicopter models, Merlin rattles off a litany of subjects common to twentieth-century American curricula (English, science, mathematics) but hardly the sort of fare pages of Arthur’s status would study in fifth-century England. Because Arthur’s royal lineage is unknown to him, he aspires to be a squire for his soon-to-be-knighted stepbrother and so must learn the rules of jousting and horsemanship when not otherwise preoccupied with page duties. These include scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning floors, and fetching anything his stepfather requests. While Arthur is not resistant to Merlin’s attempts to teach him, he struggles to balance Merlin’s demands on his time with Sir Ector’s (Pinsky 85). Young Arthur’s gangly stature conveys how stretched the boy is between his indentured servitude to Ector and Merlin’s insistence upon his liberation through education. Arthur is constantly in motion, scurrying from one task to the next to please all parties involved and often failing to do so. Each time Merlin’s instruction causes the boy to miss Sir Ector’s call, Arthur is punished with additional duties (Holcomb et al.). Merlin’s Instructive Magic Merlin uses magic to bridge the gap between Arthur’s responsibilities to his present and his future. The word “magic” is spoken fifteen times in the film, six by Merlin himself. The wizard first utters the word after packing his entire house (furniture and all) into a carpet bag. Arthur is impressed, but Merlin warns him that magic is no panacea: “don’t you get any foolish ideas that magic will solve all your problems”. Even Merlin struggles to convince Sir Ector to let him tutor Arthur and to prevent predatory animals from killing the boy during their adventures together. Magic has limits. It cannot penetrate the minds of humans nor quell the instincts of wild animals. Its impact seems restricted to the physical world. Merlin primarily uses magic for physical transformation; his lessons centre on changing Arthur into different animals to enable the future king to experience life from others’ perspectives. Merlin turns Arthur into a fish, a squirrel, and a bird, with each animal’s situation representing increasingly complex problems that Arthur must overcome. Each lesson also corresponds with one or more levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: (1) safety and survival, (2) love and belonging, and (3) self-esteem and self-actualisation (Lester 15). As a perch swimming around the castle moat, Arthur learns to use his intellect to evade a toothy pike that nearly eats him alive. As a squirrel, Arthur observes the heartbreak of unrequited love, foreshadowing his complicated love triangle with Guinevere and Lancelot (Grellner 125). In avian form, Arthur experiences a much-needed boost in his self-worth after Sir Ector strips him of his squire-in-training status. In flight, Arthur seems most in his element. After struggling with the logistics of swimming as a fish and navigating trees as a squirrel, Arthur soars over the countryside, even showing off his acrobatics to Archimedes flying alongside him. Although Arthur relishes these experiences, he does not seem to grasp their broader implications. He describes his first magical lesson as “so much fun” (despite having nearly died) and pauses only momentarily at the end of his second lesson to reflect on the emotional damage he causes a heartbroken female squirrel who falls madly in love with him. Still, Arthur faces mortal danger with each lesson, so one could argue that by transforming the young boy into different animals, Merlin is honing Arthur’s problem-solving skills (Holcomb et al.). Madam Mim’s Destructive Magic When Arthur is turned into a bird, his third lesson takes an unexpected turn. After narrowly escaping a hawk, Arthur flies into the forest and falls down the chimney of a rival magician named Mad Madam Mim. After introducing herself, Mim insists to Arthur that she has far more magic “in one little finger” than Merlin possesses in his entire repertoire. She displays her powers by killing plants, changing sizes, and making herself monstrous or lovely according to her whims. Mim’s demonstrations suggest a breezy familiarity with magic that Merlin lacks. Whereas Merlin sometimes forgets the “Latin business” needed to invoke spells, Mim effortlessly transitions from one transformation to another without any spell use. The source of her power soon becomes apparent. “Black sorcery is my dish of tea”, she croons to Arthur. Compared to Merlin’s Latin-based magic, Mim’s “black sorcery” is easier to master and well-suited to her undisciplined lifestyle. Mim’s cottage is filthy and in disrepair, yet she is playing solitaire (and cheating) when Arthur stumbles into her fireplace. This anachronism (since playing cards would not be introduced to Europeans until the fourteenth century; DeBold) characterises, through visual shorthand, Mim’s idle hands as the Devil’s workshop; she also possesses a modern dartboard that she throws Arthur against. Unlike Merlin’s domicile, Mim’s cottage contains no books, scientific instruments, or other props of study, indicating that there is no deeper understanding behind her magic. As Latin is the root language of science and law, it seems fitting that Latin is not part of Mim’s repertoire. She simply points a finger at an unfortunate subject, and it bends to her will—or dies. Efficient though Mim’s magic may be, its power is fleeting. Mim briefly changes herself into a beautiful young woman. But she concedes that her magic is “only skin deep” and turns herself back into “an ugly old creep”. Evidently, her magic’s potency does not last long, nor is it capable of improving her situation, as she continues living in her broken-down cottage as a bored, friendless hermit. Her black magic may be easy to master but cannot impart meaningful change. And so, while Merlin can use his magic to improve Arthur’s life, Mim’s magic can only serve the status quo described at the film’s beginning: the strong preying upon the weak. Although Mim lives outside the feudal social hierarchy, she uses her magic to terrorise any unfortunate creatures who wander into her clutches, including Arthur. When Arthur (still in bird form) states that he prefers the benevolence and usefulness of Merlin’s magic, an infuriated Mim transforms herself into a hungry cat and chases Arthur around the cottage until Merlin arrives to save the boy. Merlin then challenges Mim to a wizard’s duel, during which he and Mim attack each other in animal forms ranging from foxes and caterpillars to tigers, goats, and elephants. Each time Mim transforms, she does so seamlessly, requiring no momentary pause to recall a spell, unlike Merlin, who stumbles across the Latin phrases necessary to change himself into something faster or bigger. But after Merlin transforms into a walrus and squashes a clucking chicken Mim, the momentum shifts in his favour. Her magic becomes tinged with rage that causes her to make mistakes, including biting herself as a snake and ramming herself into a tree in rhinoceros form. Merlin’s disciplined playing style is nearly errorless. Although he becomes frightened when Mim transforms into a fire-breathing dragon, Merlin continues to play sensibly and courageously. His final winning move is to transform himself into a measle-like germ that incapacitates Mim with violent sneezing and cold flashes (Perciaccante and Coralli 1171). Arthur is astonished by the brilliant manoeuvring of his mentor, who manages to win the duel fairly “by dint of his knowledge and study” (Pinsky 86). After stating the lesson’s summative point for Merlin—“knowledge and wisdom is the real power”—Arthur vows to redouble his efforts to complete his education. Education: The Film’s Real Magic The lesson for viewers is simple enough: an education has a magical impact on one’s life. Put more succinctly, education is magic. Merlin defeats Mim because of his greater knowledge and cleverer use of spells. Arthur will overcome his low social status and ascend to the throne by becoming literate and sharpening his intellect. But as with Merlin’s acquisition of magical knowledge through intense study, Arthur’s royal ascension must be earned. He must learn the literal ABCs of language acquisition to gain others’ shared knowledge, as illustrated by a scene in which Archimedes painstakingly teaches Arthur how to write the alphabet in preparation for reading an enormous stack of books. Merlin cannot magically impart such knowledge to the future king; Arthur must learn it through sustained effort. He also must learn to make informed decisions rather than respond to panic or anger as Mim does during her duel with Merlin. Herein lies the distinction between Mim’s and Merlin’s magic: transformative impact. Mim’s black magic has locked her into her chosen fate. By using her powers to amuse herself or cause others harm, Mim perpetuates her outcast status as the stereotypical witch to be feared (Valle 234). While her cottage contains anachronistic elements such as playing cards (suggesting that she, like Merlin, has time-travelled), it contains no evidence of the modern advances that Merlin shares with Arthur, like aeroplane models, nor anything that might improve their feudal society. Merlin’s magic, by contrast, facilitates immediate changes to Arthur’s world and offers the promise of technological advancements in the centuries to come. To reduce the boy’s workload, for instance, Merlin magically conjures up a factory-style assembly line of brushes, tubs, and mops to wash dishes and scrub kitchen floors. Merlin also shares his knowledge of humankind’s future achievements with Arthur to advance his education, providing him with models, maps, globes, and hundreds of books. To become a proper king, Arthur must learn how to use such information to others’ advantage, not just his own. As Caroline Buts and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra observe of magic’s paradox, “using the wand without knowing properly the rules may sometimes lead to catastrophic situations” (509). This point is reaffirmed in the film’s final sequence, which takes place in London on New Year’s Day at a jousting tournament, the winner of which will be crowned king of England. Arthur, now a squire to his recently knighted stepbrother, forgets to bring his stepbrother’s sword to the tournament grounds. He attempts to replace the missing weapon with the sword in the stone when he spots the aging relic in a nearby churchyard. As Arthur pulls out the sword, angelic choral music swells, signalling that the rightful ruler of England has fulfilled the prophecy. After some scepticism from the assembled masses, Sir Ector and the other knights and spectators bow to the befuddled twelve-year-old. The film’s final scene shows a panic-stricken Arthur conceding that he does not know how to rule England and crying out for Merlin. When the wizard blows in from his most recent trip to the twentieth century, he confirms that he has known all along who Arthur is and assures the boy that he will become a great king. Arthur seems ready to put in the work, recognising that his knowledge and wisdom will improve the lives of England’s inhabitants. Conclusion Magic is thus portrayed as an intervening force that either facilitates or stymies societal progress. Good magic ensures that intelligent, educated individuals such as Arthur become great leaders, while those who would attain positions of power through brute force are thwarted from doing so. At the film’s conclusion, Arthur has not been fully transformed into a great leader because his education is far from finished; he has only learned enough to realise that he knows too little to rule effectively. Yet, from the Socratic perspective, such self-awareness is the germination for attaining true wisdom (Tarrant 263). Arthur also already knows that he will not be able to learn how to rule well through trickery or shortcuts, even with a powerful magician by his side. But the film’s closing scene reiterates this point with Merlin promising Arthur that he will succeed. “Why, they might even make a motion picture about you!” he exclaims in a clever fourth-wall joke (Gellner 120). The Sword in the Stone’s mere existence proves that Arthur will acquire the knowledge and wisdom necessary to become a truly great monarch. The fledgling pupil will live long and rule well, not because of pixie dust or magic spells, but because of his willingness to learn and to be transformed by his education into a wise and fair ruler. References Aronstein, Susan. “‘Higitus Figitus!’ Of Merlin and Disney Magic.” It’s the Disney Version! Popular Cinema and Literary Classics. Eds. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 129-139. Beck, Jerry. The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago: A Capella, 2005. Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Buts, Caroline, and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra. “The Sword in the Stone.” European State Aid Law Quarterly 16.4 (2017): 509-511. 10 June 2023 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26694185>. DeBold, Elizabeth. “Fortune’s Fools: Early Tarot Cards.” The Collation: Folger Shakespeare Library 2 Feb. 2021. 5 June 2023 <https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/fortunes-fools-early-tarot-cards/>. “Disney History.” D23, 2023. <https://d23.com/disney-history/>. Gossedge, Rob. “The Sword in the Stone: American Translatio and Disney’s Antimedievalism.” The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past. Eds. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein. Palgrave Macmillan: 2012. 115–131. Grellner, Alice. “Two Films That Sparkle: The Sword in the Stone and Camelot.” Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Rev. ed. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 118-126. Holcomb, Jeanne, Kenzie Latham, and Daniel Fernandez-Baca. “Who Cares for the Kids? Caregiving and Parenting in Disney Films.” Journal of Family Issues 36.14 (2015): 1957–81. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X13511250. Lester, David. “Measuring Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychological Reports: Mental & Physical Health 113.1 (2013): 15-17. 20 May 2023 <https://doi.org/10.2466/02.20.PR0.113x16z1>. Perciaccante, Antonio, and Alessia Coralli. “The Virus Defeating Madam Mim.” American Journal of Infection Control 45.10 (2017): 1171. 1 June 2023 <http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.07.017>. Pinsky, Mark I. The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. The Sword in the Stone. Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman. Perf. Karl Swenson and Rickie Sorensen. Buena Vista, 1963. Tarrant, Harold. “Socratic Method and Socratic Truth.” A Companion to Socrates. Eds. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 254-272. Valle, Maria Luiza Cyrino. "The New Matter of Britain: T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone." Estudos Germânicos 5.1 (1984): 224-265.

The Magic of Media and Culture In his book The History of Magic (2020), Chris Gosden contends that magic is a product of human connection with the universe, offering answers to questions of meaning and reality, and surviving for centuries because of its capacity for constant renewal. Furthermore, magic has been, and continues to be, tied to the activities and beliefs of a myriad of cultural groups, guiding their understandings of, for example, transcendence, transformation, and transactions – cultural, social, political, or otherwise. Yet, despite magic accounting for any extraordinary occurrence, both good and bad, this notion has often garnered a negative reputation in examples such as fairy tales, as well as fantasy novels, films, and television series, where it often intersects with notions of evil, greed, and corruption. Of course, magic is not limited to the mythic, supernatural, scholarly, and philosophical, and equally captures the talents of illusionists and magicians with their misdirection and ability to challenge peoples’ perceptions and common sense. Indeed, multifaceted notions of magic permeate media and culture, depicting and shaping world views for a vast array of individuals and groups. In this respect, magic functions as “a critical category” that “distinguishes things, practices, or ways of thinking from others” (Otto and Stausberg 1). Forms of magic are represented across popular narratives, from film to television, comics, animation, and beyond. Within this dichotomies of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ often occupy a central position, as do intersections with the supernatural. Magic is central to storytelling belonging to the fantasy genre, as iconographies connected to witches, wizards, and sorcery interweave to form complex representations, often connected to gender, race, and ethnicity. Magic is, to some extent, a matter of ritual practice, and depictions of magic in media and culture have the ability to take this idea as reflecting matters connected to religion and mysticism, as well as memory, history, and heritage. One would be hard-pressed, arguably, to forget the connection that ideas of ‘magic’ hold to social, cultural, and anthropological understandings of ‘witchcraft’, as often painful historical recollections emerge in the process. Magic can also be interpreted, metaphorically speaking, as a channel for discussing matters connected to technology, performance, and entertainment, as well as ecological representations that reflect anxieties and hopes connected to the environment. It is against this backdrop that this issue of M/C Journal aims to consider the place that ‘magic’ occupies in our contemporary moment. We aim to explore how recent media offerings shape our understandings of magic, conjuring, and the supernatural, as well as social and cultural depictions of the everyday. From illusionism to spells, from artistic representation to techno-social incarnations, from fantasy television to forms of animation, magic is an idea that mutates and transforms according to time and context. And while a universal and “unanimously agreed” (Otto and Stausberg 1) definition of what magic ‘is’, ontologically and epistemologically speaking, may be difficult to produce, this concept’s versatility makes it a powerful representational device. The issue opens with our feature article, “The Power of Chaos: Exploring Magic, Gender, and Agency in Netflix’s The Witcher”, where contributing editors Angelique Nairn and Lorna Piatti-Farnell provide an analysis of magic and sorcery in connection to the character arc of Yennefer in the popular series. Built on a critical framework that engages with historical echoes and complex media representations, the argument in this article explores how Yennefer’s pursuit of magic both maintains and challenges gender stereotypes, particularly as they pertain to sorceresses and witches. The next article begins with “Conjuring Up a King: The Use of Magic and Ritual in the Coronation of King Charles III”. Here, authors Lisa J. Hackett and Jo Coghlan analyse the coronation ceremony of King Charles III as founded in socio-historic practices that seemingly draw from ‘magic’ and ritual to inform the legitimisation of the British monarchy. Notions of rituals, spells, and representations also inform the following five articles in the issue. The article “‘You Know There’s No ‘It’ Right? ‘It’ Was Just Us’: Magic as a Tool for Audience Empathy in Yellowjackets’, authored by Alexander H. Beare and Amy Brierley-Beare, provides a textual analysis of online fan discourse in order to investigate the role of magic in the television show Yellowjackets and as a channel to explore the experience of grief and trauma. In “‘I Love Every Part of You’: Curse as Disability in Disney’s The Owl House”, Chloe Rattray and Katie Ellis discuss how the idea of magic is used in the titular animated series as a ‘narrative prosthesis’ in order to explore themes of inclusion and belonging connected to the representation of disability. The next article, “Magic and Spells in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)”, authored by Louise Child, focusses on how the television series offers a number of tropes that resonate with several anthropological examples of magical practice, and reflect upon relationships between spirituality, power, and gender, both personally and politically. The complex nature of spells as part of a representational cultural framework is also explored by Brennan Thomas in the article “The Transformative Magic of Education in Walt Disney’s The Sword in the Stone”, where the discussion explores how the animated film defines magic not as ‘nebulous spells or hexes’, but by interpreting it as a facilitation of societal advancement and transformative powers for the educated mind. The animated medium is also the focus of André Vasques Vital and Mariza Pinheiro Bezerra’s article, entitled “Climate Change as Dark Magic in Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir Animation”; here, the analyses surveys how ‘black magic’ serves as a means to bring about climate change, but the messages of the animation also offer a cautionary tale around anthropocentrism, nature, and power relations. The next five articles in this issue explore magic in terms of artistic expression. In “Magic and Metamodernism”, author Shaun Wilson considers magic in relation to metamodern theory, and uncovers the nature of magical power: a critical component of a metamodern affect in contemporary art. The understanding of visual art ‘as magic’ is also at the heart of Sue Beyer’s article, entitled “Metamodern Spell Casting: The Blockchain as a Conceptual Medium for Contemporary Visual Artists”; the article considers a Non-Fungible Token (a cryptographic digital asset) as a form of Metamodern spell casting and a magical instruction that transforms an object/s or idea into something else. In “Music as Magic: Breaking and Recasting the Spell of Live Music in Naarm/Melbourne” authors Shelley Brunt, Mike Callander, Sebastian Diaz-Gasca, Tami Gadir, Ian Rogers, and Catherine Strong argue that the idea of magic can be used to make sense of music’s intangibility, as well as the mystery of creative music-making and the transformative effects on audiences’ music culture. In particular, the article explores how the negative effects of the pandemic lockdowns on music in Naarm/Melbourne uncover pre-existing challenges in music work and break the “magic spell” associated with the craft overall. The final three articles in the issue explore the broad idea of ‘magic and technology’ in art, media, and culture. In “Art is Magic: The Conjuring and Mediated Deception of Janet Cardiff and George Miller”, authors Alex Davies and Alexandra Crosby base their discussion on the work of two Canadian artists who suggest that deceptive illusions created through ‘magic techniques’ can be an effective means of creating compelling and engaging experiences, where the framework of ‘magic’ provides valuable insights. Magic performances and techniques are at the centre of Sasa Miletic’s article, “Just an Illusion? The Politics of the Magic Trick”; here, the author suggests that the structure of the magic trick – from the classic sleight of hand up to levitation in front of a live TV audience – can be useful in understanding politics and ideologies, and how (in turn) the critique of ideology can help to rehabilitate the notion of “illusion”. Socio-political approaches to technologies and persuasion also inform the final article in the issue, entitled “ChatGPT Isn't Magic: The Hype and Hypocrisy of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Rhetoric”. Authors Tama Leaver and Suzanne Srdarov explore how AI technologies can be perceived due to their impenetrability, and survey how generative AI was deployed across the first six months of 2023 as either utopian or dystopian, but never trivial. While different in topic, approach, and – often – disciplinary in focus, the articles in this issue all share a thread in exploring multidimensional interpretations of ‘magic’ in media and culture. Together, they provide a comprehensive view of the hold that magic maintains on our imaginations, mixing the historical, the metaphorical, and the socio-political in one influential representational package. The editors would like to thank all the reviewers for their time and expertise. References Godsend, Chris. The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present. London: Penguin, 2020. Otto, Bernd-Christian, and Michael Stausberg. “General Introduction”. Defining Magic: A Reader. Eds. Bernd-Christian Otto and Michael Stausberg. London: Routledge, 2014.

In 2019, Netflix released the first season of its highly anticipated show The Witcher. Based on the books of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the fantasy show tells the intersecting stories of the Witcher Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), the princess of Cintra Ciri (Freya Allan), and sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who is commonly referred to as a ‘mage’. Although not as popular among critics as its original book incarnations and adapted game counterparts, the show went on to achieve an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and was subsequently renewed for more seasons. Although the general success of the show is clear among viewers, The Witcher was not without its detractors, who accused creator Lauren Hissrich of developing a woke series with a feminist agenda (Worrall), especially because of her desire to emphasise strong female characters (Crow). The latter is, of course, a direction that the Netflix series inherited from the video game version of The Witcher – especially The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – even if the portrayal is often considered to be biased and “problematic” (Heritage). Supporting the view that the show focusses on the character trajectories of independent and capable women is the analysis offered by Worrow (61), who attests that “the female representations in season one of The Witcher offer prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs”. Although Worrow’s analysis offers a clear critical account of Yennefer’s story arc – among the other female characters – what it does not consider is the relationship between women and magic, which has historically seen the mistreatment and ostracising of women as practitioners, and which tacitly informs representation in The Witcher by providing a gendered view of magical power. In response to this, the purpose of our article is to consider how Yennefer’s pursuit of magic both maintains and challenges gender stereotypes, particularly as they pertain to sorceresses and witches. The analysis will focus primarily on the episodes of Season One. Through the course of Season One, audiences are introduced to the character of Yennefer as she transitions from a deformed woman into a ‘beautiful’ sorceress. Alienated by her community because of a hunched back and cleft palate, Yennefer remains mistreated until she exhibits magical tendencies – or “the ability to conduct Chaos” (Guimarães). This is an aptitude that will later be revealed to be a direct outcome of her Elvin heritage (Worrow). Having gained the attention of Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), the Rectress of the magical school Aretuza, Yennefer is purchased from her family and relocated to Aretuza to train as a mage. Initially, Yennefer struggles with the magic training, where magic itself is referred to as “chaos”. In particular, she specifically finds it hard to “control [her] chaos”, as the series puts it, because of her emotional tendencies. After a short period of time, however, Yennefer develops into a strong, talented sorceress who is later instrumental in the final battle of Season One against the Nilfgaardian forces that are at war with the city-state of Cintra (Chitwood); the conflict with the kingdom of Nilfgaard is a central plot development in The Witcher, running across multiple seasons of the series. Throughout Season One, audiences view Yennefer’s character development, as she sheds her kind, naïve personality in favour of becoming an agent of chaos, who is fully immersed in the political intrigue that influences the Continent – the broader geographical land where the events of The Witcher take place. What It Means to Be a Sorceress For the purpose of this article, we will be using the terms “sorceress” and “witch” interchangeably (Stratton). It is important to mention here that several strands of anthropological research contend that the two terms are not synonymous, with “sorcery” referring to the ability to “manipulate supernatural forces for malicious or deviant purposes” (Moro, 2); the term “witch”, on the other hand, would preferably be used for “people suspected of practising, either deliberately or unconsciously, socially prohibited forms of magic“ (Moro, 1). Nonetheless, historians and sociologists have long equated the two because of their prepotency to describe magic users who channel power for productive and nefarious purposes (Godsend; Lipscomb). We cite our understanding of these important terminologies in the latter critical area, seeing the important social, cultural, and political interconnections concomitantly held by the terms “sorceress” and “witch” in the context of magical practices within The Witcher series. ‘Mage’, for its part, seems to be used in the series as a gender-neutral term, openly recalling a well-known narrative trajectory from both fantasy novels and games. Regardless of whether they were deemed witches, sorceresses, mages, or enchantresses, and despite historical records that prove the contrary, practitioners of magic, as such, have predominantly been gendered as female (Godwin; Stratton). Such a misconception has meant that stereotypes and representations of magic and witchcraft in popular culture have continued to show a penchant for depicting witches not only as female but also as powerful and intimidating beings that continuously challenge hegemonic power structures (Burger & Mix; Stratton). Historically, and especially so in the Western context, individuals labelled as witches and sorceresses have been ostracised, in some instances eradicated through mass killings, to ostensibly contain their power and remove the threat of the evil they inevitably embodied and represented (Johnson). This established historical framework is tacitly embedded in the narrative structure of The Witcher, with examples such as Yennefer often being portrayed as out of control because of her magical powers. The series, however, acknowledges unspoken historical truths and reinforces its own canon, as it is made clear throughout that men can also be magic users; indeed, the show includes a variety of male druids, sorcerers, and mages. Where a potential gender divide exists, however, is in reference to the Brotherhood of Sorcerers, who seemingly control the activities and powers of magical practitioners. Although there is a female equivalent in Sapkowski’s novels, called the Lodge of Sorceresses, the first season of The Witcher does not openly engage with it. Such an omission could be construed as a gender concern in the Netflix show, as a patriarchal group seemingly oversees the activities of mages. As Worrow argues, the show implies that “The Brotherhood controls and legitimizes the use of magic” (66), and by being referred to as a ‘brotherhood’, creates a gender imbalance within the series. This interpretation is not unexpected, bearing in mind that gender studies scholars have consistently pointed out how structural inequalities exist, even in fictitious offerings. In social, cultural, and media contexts alike, these offerings subordinate women in favour of maintaining ideologies that advantage hegemonic masculinity (Connell; Butler). Where the stereotypes of women diverge in The Witcher, however, is in the general characterisation of these powerful witches and sorceresses as empathetic and compassionate individuals. Across the history of representation, witches have been portrayed as cruel, evil, manipulative, and devious, making witches one of the most recognisable tropes of evil women in storytelling, from fairy tales to film, TV, novels, and games (Zipes). While a number of notable exceptions exist – one should only think here of Practical Magic, both in its book and film adaptations (1995/1998), as examples of texts exploring the notion of the good witch – the representational stereotype of witches as wicked and malevolent creatures has held centrally true. A witch’s activities are generally focussed on controlling and bringing misfortune upon others, in favour of their own gain (Moro). As Schimmelpfennig puts it, the recurrent image of the witch is that of someone who is “envious” of others: “nobody loves, likes, or pities her. She seems to have brought disaster upon herself and lives on the margins of society, [often] visualised by her residence in the woods” (31). The common perception, as cemented in fictional contexts, has been that witches have nefarious and villainous intents, and their magical actions (especially) are perpetually motivated by this. Although she was initially alienated by both her magical and non-magical communities, Yennefer’s character development does not adhere exactly to the broadly established characterisation of witches. Admittedly, she does act in morally ambiguous ways. For example, in the episode “Bottled Appetites”, her desire to have children leads her to attempt to control a jinn regardless of the dangerous costs to herself and others. And yet, in the following episode, "Rare Species", Yennefer changes her mind about trying to slay a dragon whose magical properties could help her, and instead works with Geralt to defend the Dragon and its family from Reavers. She also confronts injustices by helping to defend the territory of Sodden Hill which is threatened by Nilfgaardian forces ("Much More"). Rather than being purely evil, as witches have long been considered to be, Yennefer offers a more nuanced and relatable depiction, as both a witch and, arguably, a woman character. The moral complexity of Yennefer as a magical figure, then, not only makes for compelling viewing – with such magical characters often being an expected presence in mainstream programming (Greene) – but her continued growth, and the attention given to her identity development by showrunners, challenge gender stereotypes. On screen, female characters have often been treated as auxiliaries to their male counterparts (Taber et al.); they have fulfilled roles as mother, lover, or damsel in distress, reducing any potential for growth (Nairn). The Witcher Season One gives Yennefer her own arc and, in doing so, becomes a series that elevates the status of women rather than treating them as, to borrow Simone de Bauvoir’s famous words, ‘the second sex’. Power & Empowerment Differentiating Yennefer from the stereotypes of female characters, and witches/sorceresses more specifically within the broader popular media and culture landscape, is her obvious agency within The Witcher series. Gammage et al. argue that agency can be understood as “the capacity for purposive action, the ability to make decisions and pursue goals free from violence, retribution, and fear, but it also includes a cognitive dimension” (6). Throughout The Witcher, Yennefer does not act subserviently and will even oppose the will of those around her. For example, in the episode “Before the Fall”, she gives advice to young girls training to be mages to ignore the instructions of their tutors and "to think for themselves" (26:19-26:20). She follows up by later telling the young mages about how Aretuza takes away their opportunity to bear children, to ensure the mages stay loyal to the cause. As she puts it: "Even if you do everything right, follow their rules, that's still no guarantee you will get what you want" (29:42-29:51). This exposes her character as not tied to traditional patriarchal notions of subservience. And while personal motivations may laterally aid the conception of witches as egotistical, her actions still stand out as being propelled by individual agency. Female characters on screen have often been portrayed as submissive and passive, and this includes iconic on-screen witches from Samantha in Bewitched to the titular character in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It is not uncommon to see good witches in popular media and culture, in particular, as still defined by male relationships in terms of cultural and social value (for instance, Sally Owens in Practical Magic, and Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). As Godwin puts it, these characters embody the expected gender roles of a patriarchal society, with storylines, for example, that favour love potions or keeping house. As far as The Witcher is concerned, being submissive and passive is often in direct contrast with Yennefer’s preferences. For example, in “Betrayer Moon”, she intentionally ignores the decision of the Brotherhood to act as the mage in Nilfgaard by intentionally catching the eye of the King of Aedirn: the King then asks for Yennefer to be his mage. Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), who was supposed to be the mage in Aedirn, is forced to go to Nilfgaard instead. Yennefer's behaviour not only defies The Brotherhood in favour of her own interests but also demonstrates her unwillingness to conform to the expectations placed on her. Such depictions of Yennefer acting with agency make her, arguably, relatable to audiences. Female characters and witches such as Yennefer become emblematic of independent, competent women who use magic to take control of their own destiny (Burger and Mix) and can be praised for opposing “oppressive societal norms” and instead advocating for “independent thought” (Godwin 92). It is possible to argue here that what drives Yennefer appears to be her sense of Otherness, as an intrinsic difference that is central to her being, both physically and emotionally. Although initially her othered nature is seemingly the product of her deformities and ethnic background (with elves being socially, culturally, and politically ostracised on the Continent), she openly admits to feeling othered throughout the series, even after her physical disfigurement is cured by magic. Her individualised agency makes her inevitably stand out and becomes a marker of difference. This representation is not dissimilar to the feelings expressed by women across First, Second, and Third-wave Feminism (Butler; Connell). Indeed, Worrow observes that “The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities” (61). It would seem that, in essence, the show surreptitiously gives voice to the plight of minority groups through the hard work, dedication, and determination of Yennefer as an Othered character, as she struggles and defies expectations in pursuit of her goal of becoming a powerful sorceress. Her independence and agency tell a story of empowerment because, like other fictional witches of the last decade in the twenty-first century, Yennefer “refuses to pretend to be someone or something they are not, eschewing the lie to instead embody the truth of themselves, their identity's, and their unapologetic strength” (Burger and Mix 14). This profoundly diverges from other representations where being the ‘other’ was seen as a justification for punishment, marginalisation, or mistreatment, and amply seen across the historicised media spectrum, from Disney films to horror narratives and beyond. Nonetheless, although it appears as if Yennefer has agency and is empowered, there is the argument that she is a conduit of magic, and as such, lacks real power and influence without a capacity to control the chaos. As Godwin contends, witches are often limited in their capacity to be influential and to have true autonomy by the fact that they do not possess magic but are often seemingly controlled by it. At various times in Season One, Yennefer struggles to control the chaos magic. For example, while being beaten up, she inadvertently portals for the first time. During her magical training, she can't manage a number of magical tasks ("Four Marks"). Here, the suggestion is that she is not completely free to act as she chooses because it can produce unintentional consequences or no consequences at all; this conceptual enslavement to magic as the source of her power and individuality seemingly dilutes some of her agency. Furthermore, instances of her trying to control the chaos within the show also conform to stereotypes of women being ruled by emotions and prone to hysterical outbursts (Johnson). Aesthetics & Sexuality Stereotypically, and in keeping with fictional tropes in literature, media, and film, witches have been described as “mature” women, “with bad skin, crooked teeth, foul breath, a cackling laugh, and a big nose with a wart at the end of it” (Henderson 66). Classic examples include the witches depicted in the works of the Brothers Grimm, Disney’s instances of Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone and the transformed Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the witches of Roald Dahl’s eponymous novel (1983), and (even more traditionally and iconically) the hags of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623). Yet, more recently the witch aesthetic has altered significantly in the media spectrum with an increased focus on young, alluring, and enchanting women, such as Rowan Fielding in Mayfair Witches (2023 –), Sabrina Spellman of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Freya Mikealson of The Originals (2013–2018), and of course, Yennefer in The Witcher. These examples emphasise that female magic users, much like a significant ratio of female characters in popular culture, are sexualised, with the seductive nature of the witch taking precedence and, in some cases, detracting from the character's agency as she becomes objectified for the male gaze (Mulvey). The hiring of actress Chaltora as Yennefer, although designed to challenge racialised beauty standards (Kain), does not dispel the treatment of women as sex objects as she is filmed nude during some magic rituals and in intimate scenes. Importantly, and as briefly mentioned above, when Yennefer’s back story is told, she is introduced as a young woman with physical deformities. As part of her ascension to a sorceress, she is required to undergo a physical transformation to make her beautiful, as conventional beauty and allure appear to be requirements for mages. As Worrow (66) attests, she is seen “undergoing an invasive, painful, magical metamorphosis which remakes her in the image of classical feminine beauty”. Unsurprisingly, the makeover received backlash for being ableist (Calder), but the magical change also enforced stereotypical views of women needing to be “manicured and coiffed” (Eckert, 530) to have relevancy and value. Yennefer’s beautifying procedure could also be interpreted as paralleling current cultural currents in contemporary society, where cosmetic interventions and physical transformations, often in the form of plastic surgery, are encouraged for women to be accepted. Indeed, Yennefer is shown as being much more accepted by human and mage communities alike after her transformation, as both her political and magical influence grows. In these terms, the portrayal of Yennefer maintains rather than challenges gender norms, making for a disappointing turn in the plotline of The Witcher. The decision to submit to the transformation also came at a cost to Yennefer. She was forced to forfeit her uterus and by extension her potential to become a mother. Such a storyline conforms to Creed’s long-standing perspective that “when a woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions” (118). Here, even after achieving the expected beauty standards, Yennefer is still treated as abject because she can no longer “fulfil the function dictated by patriarchal and phallocentric hegemony” (Worrow 68), which further contributes to the widespread ideological perspective that women’s roles are to be nurturing and child-rearing (Bueskens). Of course, motherhood remains a contentious topic for Yennefer as, although she made the decision to forgo her uterus in pursuit of power and beauty, she later comes to regret that decision. In the episode “Rare Specifies”, Yennefer admits to Geralt that she feels loss and sadness over her inability to reproduce, which contributes to the complexity and inner turmoil of her character, while equally reinforcing the perception that women should be mothers. Her initial independence and choice are undermined by her attempts to regain her uterus and later, in Season 3, by her adopting the role of mother figure to Ciri. Conclusion In many respects, the story arc of sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg conforms to what McRobbie describes as female individualism, and Gill considers post-feminist. That is, Yennefer has choice and agency. She makes decisions out of a sense of entitlement, and privileges her desire for power, beauty, and freedom, sometimes above all else. Much like other post-feminist icons, Yennefer is empowered and challenges gender stereotypes that charge women with being passive and submissive. Yet, despite the fact that 60% of the writing credits are held by women on The Witcher (Worrow), Yennefer’s character is still objectified. Although the male gaze might not always be privileged, there are examples where her sexuality is exploited; by being portrayed as physically attractive, desirable, and promiscuous, she still conforms to gender norms about ideal beauty standards. The sexuality of her character maintains perceptions of witches and sorceresses as seducers, and while she is not cavorting with Satan, as many witches have historically claimed to be (Stratton), her depiction maintains the adage that sex sells – at least as far as media production goes. Ultimately, the character of Yennefer in The Witcher appears to be an attempt to respond to a tacit cultural desire for strong female characters with relatable storylines, without ostracising male fans. Despite the desire to include empowered female characters in the show, however, Yennefer is also depicted as a continuously unhappy and unfulfilled character, as her value becomes entangled with notions of motherhood. The balancing of these competing adages continues to simultaneously maintain and challenge stereotypes of witches and sorceresses, as representational exemplifications of women’s experiences in media and culture. References “Before a Fall.” The Witcher. Created by Lauren Hissrich. Season 1, episode 7. Netflix. Little Schmidt Productions, 2019. “Betrayer Moon.” The Witcher. Created by Lauren Hissrich. Season 1, episode 3. Netflix. Little Schmidt Productions, 2019. “Bottled Appetites.” The Witcher. Created by Lauren Hissrich. Season 1, episode 5. Netflix. Little Schmidt Productions, 2019. Bueskens, Petra. Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract. London: Routledge, 2018. 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Let’s Go Back to the Continent.” Netflix Tudum, 23 June 2023. 5 Aug. 2023 <https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-witcher-season-1-recap>. Johnson, Forrest. “Reanimating Witchcraft: Creating a Feminist Embodied Experience in Marvel’s Scarlet Witch.” The Superhero Multiverse: Readapting Comic Book Icons in Twenty-First-Century Film and Popular Media. Ed. Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022. Kain, Erik. “’The Witcher’ Casting Director Says Yennefer Casting Was to ‘Challenge Beauty Standards’ Which Is Completely Insane.” Forbes, 27 July 2023. 5 Aug. 2023 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/07/27/the-witcher-casting-director-says-yennefer-casting-was-to-challenge-beauty-standards-which-is-completely-insane/?sh=23ceb8bf55f1>. Lipscombe, Elizabeth. A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult. London: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2020. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4.3 (2004): 255-264. Moro, Pamela A. “Witchcraft, Sorcery and Magic.” The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Eds. Hilary Callan and Simon Coleman. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. “Much More.” The Witcher. Created by Lauren Hissrich. Season 1, episode 8. Netflix. Little Schmidt Productions, 2019. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Nairn, Angelique. “Super-Heroine Objectification: The Sexualization of Black Widow across Comic and Film Adaptations.” The Superhero Multiverse: Readapting Comic Book Icons in Twenty-First-Century Film and Popular Media. Ed. Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022. “Rare Species.” The Witcher. Created by Lauren Hissrich. Season 1, episode 6. Netflix. Little Schmidt Productions, 2019. Rotten Tomatoes. The Witcher. 8 Aug. 2023. <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_witcher/s01>. Stratton, Kimberly B. “Interrogating the Magic-Gender Connection.” Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World. Eds. Kimberly B. Stratton and Dayna S. Kalleres. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Taber, Nancy, Vera Woloshyn, Caitlin Munn, and Laura Lane. “Exploring Representations of Super Women in Popular Culture.” Adult Learning 25.4 (2014): 142-150. Talukdar, Indrayudh. “How Did Yennefer Turn into a Motherly Figure for Ciri in ‘The Witcher’ Season 3?” Film Fugitives, 30 June 2023. 5 Aug. 2023 <https://fugitives.com/the-witcher-season-3-character-yennefer-explained-2023-fantasy-series/>. The Witcher. Created by Lauren Hissrich. Netflix, 2019-present. Worrall, William. “Netflix’s The Witcher Finds Universal Acclaim on Twitter Despite Criticism over ‘Feminist Agenda’.” CCN, 23 Sep. 2020. 5 Aug. 2023 <https://www.ccn.com/netflix-the-witcher-finds-universal-acclaim-twitter/>. Worrow, Kirsty. “’Pretty Ballads Hide Bastard Truths’: Patriarchal Narratives and Female Power in Netflix’s The Witcher.” Gender and Female Villains in 21st Century Fairy Tale Narratives: From Evil Queens to Wicked Witches. Eds. Natalie Le Clue and Janelle Vermaak-Griessel. Bingley: Emerald, 2022. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2013.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.