An Instinct for Dragons PDF Download

Author: David E. Jones
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415937290
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

Author: David E. Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134951396
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
First published in 2002. The image of a dragon- magnificent, terrifying, voracious and powerful- is ingrained in our culture. But where di it originate? And how is that people from Africa to China to America picture it the same? An Instinct for Dragons is anthropologist David E. Jones' account of his search for the mysterious birth of this ubiquitous monster. Nit only does virtually every culture in the world have a name for dragons- smok in Polish, tatsu in Japanese, unktena in Cherokee- but dragons everywhere share many of the same characteristics: multiple heads, blazing eyes, earth-shaking roars, fiery breath, and the abduction of princesses. Spanning dragon lore from all paces and periods, Jones scrutinizes sightings and references from dragon inscriptions on cave walls, cliffs and pots to the Loch Ness monster to the Internet. Jones' research is erudite, and his conclusion is stunning; not only is our fear and fascination with dragons a direct result of the predators who threatened our evolution, but humankind is essentially 'hardwired' to believe in the dragon. This book will fascinate any reader interested in the cultural history of this most venerable of monsters.

Author: Martin Arnold
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780239416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
From the fire-breathing beasts of North European myth and legend to the Book of Revelation’s Great Red Dragon of Hell, from those supernatural agencies of imperial authority in ancient China to the so-called dragon-women who threaten male authority, dragons are a global phenomenon, one that has troubled humanity for thousands of years. These often scaly beasts take a wide variety of forms and meanings, but there is one thing they all have in common: our fear of their formidable power and, as a consequence, our need either to overcome, appease, or in some way assume that power as our own. In this fiery cultural history, Martin Arnold asks how these unifying impulses can be explained. Are they owed to our need to impose order on chaos in the form of a dragon-slaying hero? Is it our terror of nature, writ large, unleashed in its most destructive form? Or is the dragon nothing less than an expression of that greatest and most disturbing mystery of all: our mortality? Tracing the history of ideas about dragons from the earliest of times to Game of Thrones, Arnold explores exactly what it might be that calls forth such creatures from the darkest corners of our collective imagination.

Author: Patricia Briggs
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101133902
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs comes the first “thrilling”* novel in the Hurog duology. Most everyone thinks Ward of Hurog is a simple-minded fool—and that’s just fine by him. But few people know that his foolishness is (very convincingly) feigned. And that it’s the only thing that’s saved him from death. When his abusive father dies, Ward becomes the new lord of Hurog...until a nobleman declares that he is too dim-witted to rule. Ward knows he cannot play the fool any longer. To regain his kingdom, he must prove himself worthy—and quickly. Riding into a war that’s heating up on the border, Ward is sure he’s on the fast track to glory. But soon his mission takes a deadly serious turn. For he has seen a pile of magical dragon bones hidden deep beneath Hurog Keep. The bones can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and Ward is certain his enemies will stop at nothing to possess them...

Author: Philip Reeve
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 0545829860
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
A thrilling adventure from award-winning master storyteller Philip Reeve! Ansel's new master slays dragons for a living. He says he's hunted the monstrous worms all over Christendom-and he has the scars to prove it! But is Brock just a clever trickster in shining armor? Ansel is sure there is no such things as dragons. So what is the man-eating creature that lives in the crags of Dragon Mountain? As he and Brock climb the perilous ice-face to its lair, Ansel is about to discover the horrifying truth. A heart-pounding new fantasy with a brilliant twist from Philip Reeve, one of the world's greatest writers.

Author: Kris Hirschmann
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1601523599
Category : Dragons
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
Huge lizard--like creatures that fly and breathe fire--dragons have terrified and fascinated people for centuries. Stories of dragons have been told in almost every culture around the world. From ancient myths to modern films, no real or imaginary animal has sparked the human imagination as much as the dragon.

Author: Scott G. Bruce
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525506691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient Rome to Game of Thrones A Penguin Classic The most popular mythological creature in the human imagination, dragons have provoked fear and fascination for their lethal venom and crushing coils, and as avatars of the Antichrist, servants of Satan, couriers of the damned to Hell, portents of disaster, and harbingers of the last days. Here are accounts spanning millennia and continents of these monsters that mark the boundary between the known and the unknown, including: their origins in the deserts of Africa; their struggles with their mortal enemies, elephants, in the jungles of South Asia; their fear of lightning; the world’s first dragon slayer, in an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns; the colossal sea monster Leviathan; the seven-headed “great red dragon” of the Book of Revelation; the Loch Ness monster; the dragon in Beowulf, who inspired Smaug in Tolkien’s The Hobbit; the dragons in the prophecies of the wizard Merlin; a dragon saved from a centipede in Japan who gifts his human savior a magical bag of rice; the supernatural feathered serpent of ancient Mesoamerica; and a flatulent dragon the size of the Trojan Horse. From the dark halls of the Lonely Mountain to the blue skies of Westeros, we expect dragons to be gigantic, reptilian predators with massive, bat-like wings, who wreak havoc defending the gold they have hoarded in the deep places of the earth. But dragons are full of surprises, as is this book.

Author: Emily Hawkins
Publisher: Frances Lincoln Limited
ISBN: 0711290970
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
A Natural History of Dragons is a complete guide to dragons from around the world, from ancient lore and superstitions, to their anatomy, behavior, and lifecycles.

Author: Robert M. Sarwark
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476652570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Dragons are everywhere, seemingly hidden in plain sight. These mythological reptilian monsters date far into known human history in nearly every part of the world and are still prevalent in today's media and entertainment. The wide cultural, geographical, and linguistic diffusion of dragons or dragon-like creatures shows how modern humans have influenced each other through shared tales of monsters while simultaneously hinting at a shared genesis. This book introduces dragon myths and legends from around the world by following human culture's shared evolutionary past via language, folklore, the arts, and commerce. Dragons in folklore, literature, and pop culture are analyzed from Eastern and Western perspectives, leading to a dual analysis of dragons in today's popular culture and media. While other books on the topic have focused primarily on classical sources, or on cataloging various dragon tales in general, this work identifies the subtle yet profound ways in which the dragon figure or related motifs have slyly entered into our collective psyche as participants in the modern, interconnected world.

Author: Robert Blust
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004678301
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Modernization and conversion to world religions are threatening the survival of traditional belief systems, leaving behind only mysterious traces of their existence. This book, based upon extensive research conducted over a period of nearly four decades, brings scientific rigor to one of the questions that have always attracted human curiosity: that of the origin of the dragon. The author demonstrates that both dragons and rainbows are cultural universals, that many of the traits that are attributed to dragons in widely separated parts of the planet are also attributed to rainbows, and that the number and antiquity of such shared traits cannot be attributed to chance or common inheritance, but rather to common cognitive pathways by which human psychology has responded to the natural environment in a wide array of cultures around the world.