USD $128.00
The Modern Afterlives of Old Irish Travel Narratives
From Gulliver to Star Trek
Series: - Literary Reception & Art Reception, Volume: 1
Author:
This book explores the reception of the medieval Irish tradition of fantastic journey tales in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Umberto Eco's Baudolino, and the science fiction television franchises Star Trek and Stargate. In doing so, the book opens the door to a new history of literary reception, using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval texts. It aims to show that there is a family of texts produced in the post-medieval period that are heirs of the medieval Irish literary tradition of fantastic voyage narratives and that using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval works can open up new perspectives in our understanding of these works.
Natalia I. Petrovskaia holds MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is Assistant Professor in Celtic at Utrecht University. Her recent publications include This is Not a Grail Romance. Understanding Historia Peredur vab Efrawc (University of Wales Press, 2023).
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures and Table
Abbreviations
1 Introduction: These Are the Voyages…
1.1 The Old Irish ‘Genre System’, Otherworlds, and Utopias
1.2 The Tropological Mode
1.3 The Intertextual Matrix
1.4 Structure and Route
2 C. S. Lewis, the Dawn Treader, and St Brendan
2.1 C. S. Lewis’s Dialogic Imagination
2.2 The Dawn Treader and Fourfold Interpretation
3 Umberto Eco, ‘Reality’ and Prester John
3.1 Creating and Following the Footsteps of Saint Brendan
3.2 Umberto Eco’s Construction of Space
3.3 Making the Incredulous Reader Believe in the Fantastic
4 Jonathan Swift, the Echtra and the Immram Tradition
4.1 Swift and Allegorical Reading
4.2 Swift’s Real-World Framework
4.3 Gulliver’s Islands and the Problems of Utopia
5 Star Trek as Immram, and ‘Space, the Final Frontier…’
5.1 Planets as Islands
5.2 ‘Optimism, Captain!’ Rowing-about with Cheer
5.3 These are the Immrama of the Starship Echtra
6 Stargate as an Echtra Narrative
6.1 Stargate’s Planetary Otherworlds
6.2 Stargate Ustopias
6.3 Postcolonial Echtrai
7 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Figures and Table
Abbreviations
1 Introduction: These Are the Voyages…
1.1 The Old Irish ‘Genre System’, Otherworlds, and Utopias
1.2 The Tropological Mode
1.3 The Intertextual Matrix
1.4 Structure and Route
2 C. S. Lewis, the Dawn Treader, and St Brendan
2.1 C. S. Lewis’s Dialogic Imagination
2.2 The Dawn Treader and Fourfold Interpretation
3 Umberto Eco, ‘Reality’ and Prester John
3.1 Creating and Following the Footsteps of Saint Brendan
3.2 Umberto Eco’s Construction of Space
3.3 Making the Incredulous Reader Believe in the Fantastic
4 Jonathan Swift, the Echtra and the Immram Tradition
4.1 Swift and Allegorical Reading
4.2 Swift’s Real-World Framework
4.3 Gulliver’s Islands and the Problems of Utopia
5 Star Trek as Immram, and ‘Space, the Final Frontier…’
5.1 Planets as Islands
5.2 ‘Optimism, Captain!’ Rowing-about with Cheer
5.3 These are the Immrama of the Starship Echtra
6 Stargate as an Echtra Narrative
6.1 Stargate’s Planetary Otherworlds
6.2 Stargate Ustopias
6.3 Postcolonial Echtrai
7 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Academic institutes, researchers and postgraduates in the following subjects: Celtic Studies, Medieval Literature, Literary Studies, Reception Studies, Irish Studies, Medievalism, Media Studies.