Startseite Religionswissenschaft, Bibelwissenschaft und Theologie Gog and Magog in Literary Reception History: The Persistence of the Fantastic
Artikel
Lizenziert
Nicht lizenziert Erfordert eine Authentifizierung

Gog and Magog in Literary Reception History: The Persistence of the Fantastic

  • Anthony C. Swindell EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 27. April 2016

Abstract

Of all biblical topoi within the repertoire of Western culture, the Gog and Magog narratives have a presence in literary reception history that far outweighs their slender beginnings. They tend also to be an alien element in the metanarratives in which they occur. Even in their earliest biblical manifestation, the ‘Go’ narratives seem to have been grafted onto an existing text. Almost always, their use implies the recovery of the archaic as a means of replenishing or revitalizing present culture. At the same time they persistently signal the phenomenon of the unassimilable in human experience. The topos of Gog of the land of Magog in Ezekiel 38–39 modulates into the twin apocalyptic figures of Gog and Magog of Revelation 20:8–9. Later they become part of the conceptualization of the cultural Other, the uncivilized hordes which must be kept at bay. In European literature they assume a plastic form as representations of what is excluded from culture. In British literature (with which we will be chiefly concerned) they occupy an ambiguous position as figures of the defeated paganism which Christianity has replaced and yet as symbols of a hopeful or whimsical alterity which resists the language, the hegemonic discourse, of the status quo.

Works Cited

Primary SourcesSuche in Google Scholar

Barker, George. 1976. Dialogues etc. London: Faber and Faber.Suche in Google Scholar

Dickens, Charles. 1958. “Master Humphrey’s Clock,” in Master Humphrey’s Clock and A Child’s History of England, Charles Dickens 1–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Dickens, Charles. 1974. The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 3, edited by Madeline House et al., Oxford: Clarendon Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Dickens, Charles. 1999. The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 11, edited by Madeline House et al., Oxford: Clarendon Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Drayton, Michael. 1876 [1612]. “Polyolbion.” In The Complete Works of Michael Drayton, edited by Richard Hooper, London. Library of California website, 2008. Accessed March 25, 2014. http://archive.org/stream/completeworksofm01dray/completeworksofm01dray_djvu.txt.Suche in Google Scholar

Drayton, Michael. 2005 [1876]. The Complete Works of Michael Drayton, vol. 1, ed. Richard Hooper. London: Elibryon Classics.Suche in Google Scholar

Galt, John [published under the pseudonym Robin Goodfellow]. The History of Gog and Magog: The Champions of London; Containing an Account of the Origin of Many Things Relative to the City. London: John Souter, 1819. Available online: University of Glasgow Scots Teaching and Resource Network. Accessed May 4, 2014. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/STELLA/STARN/prose/GALT/GOG/main.htm.Suche in Google Scholar

Hardy, Thomas. 2008. The Return of the Native. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/owc/9780199537044.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar

Hone, William. 1970 [1823]. Ancient Mysteries Described. London: Ward Lock.Suche in Google Scholar

Jones, David. 2010 [1937]. In Parenthesis. London: Faber.Suche in Google Scholar

Joyce, James. 2000 [1939]. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin.Suche in Google Scholar

Lebor Gabala Erren [1150 CE]. Irish Texts Society. Accessed April 15, 2014. http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/irish/lebor.html.Suche in Google Scholar

Lycidas. 1966. In Milton Poetical Works edited by Douglas Bush. London: Oxford University Press, 141–147.Suche in Google Scholar

Mandeville, Sir John. 2005. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley. London: Penguin.Suche in Google Scholar

Melville, Herman. 2005 [1854]. “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs.” In The Encantadas and Other Stories. New York: Dover, 77–88.Suche in Google Scholar

Milton, John. 1670. The History of Britain. London: John Martyn, The John Milton Reading Room: Dartmouth University website. Accessed March 25, 2014. https://www.dartmouth.edu/∼milton/reading_room/britain/text.shtml.Suche in Google Scholar

O’Driscoll, Ciaran. 1987. “Gog and Magog.” In Gog and Magog. Auburn, Galway: Salmon Publishing, 22–23.Suche in Google Scholar

Sinclair, Andrew. 1972. Magog. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Suche in Google Scholar

Sinclair, Andrew. 1988 [1967]. Gog. London: Sceptre.Suche in Google Scholar

Sinclair, Andrew. 1988. King Ludd. London: Hodder and Stoughton.Suche in Google Scholar

Secondary SourcesSuche in Google Scholar

Anderson, Andrew Runni. 1932. Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Inclosed Nations. Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America.Suche in Google Scholar

Bergerson, David M. 1988. “Representation in Renaissance English Pageants.” Theatre Journal 40 (3): Perspectives in Theatre History 319–331.10.2307/3208322Suche in Google Scholar

Briggs, Katherine. 1972. “Possible Mythological Elements in English Folktales.” Folklore 83 (4): 265–271.10.1080/0015587X.1972.9716481Suche in Google Scholar

Carley, James P., and Julia Crick. “Constructing Albion’s Past: an Annotated Edition of De Origine Gigantum.” In Arthurian Literature XIII, edited by James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy, 41–114.Suche in Google Scholar

Cogley, Richard W. 2005. “’The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation of all the World’: Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes (ca. 1610).” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (3): 781–814.10.1353/ren.2008.0809Suche in Google Scholar

Cohen, Geoffrey Jerome. 1999. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Congdon, Lee. 1974. “Endry Ady’s Summons to National Regeneration in Hungary, 1900–1919.” Slavic Review 33 (2): 302–322.10.2307/2495796Suche in Google Scholar

Damon, S. Foster. 1973. A Blake Dictionary. London: Thames and Hudson.Suche in Google Scholar

D’Evelyn, Charlotte. 1918. “The Middle English Metrical Version of the Revelations of Methodius: With a Study of the Influence of Methodius in Middle-English Writings.” PMLA 33 (2): 135–203.10.2307/457111Suche in Google Scholar

Fleishman, Avrom. 1978. Fiction and the Ways of Knowing. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.10.7560/724228Suche in Google Scholar

Gourvitch, I. 1928. “Drayton’s Debt to Geoffrey of Monmouth.” The Review of English Studies 4 (16): 394–403.10.1093/res/os-IV.16.394Suche in Google Scholar

Hooker, Jeremy. 1976. “Brut’s Albion.” In David Jones: Eight Essays on his Work as a Writer and Artist, edited by Roland Mathias. Llandysul, Wales: Gomer Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Johnson, Lesley. 1995. “Return to Albion.” In Arthurian Literature XIII, edited by James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy, 19–40, Cambridge: Brewer.Suche in Google Scholar

Kingsford, Charles Lethbridge. 1901. Henry V: The Typical Medieval Hero. London: Putnam’s Sons.Suche in Google Scholar

McKay, J. S. 2010. “Gog and Magog: Guardians of the City.” In London Gothic, edited by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard, 121–139. London: Continuum.Suche in Google Scholar

Meckier, Jerome. 1979. “Cycle, Symbol, and Parody in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Decline and Fall.’” Contemporary Literature 20 (1): 51–75.10.2307/1208210Suche in Google Scholar

Mundhenk, Rosemary. 1992. “Creative Ambivalence in Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32 (4): 645–661.10.2307/450964Suche in Google Scholar

Revard, Stella P. 2011 [2005]. “Milton and Millenarianism.” In Milton and the Ends of Time, edited by Juliet Cummins, 42–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Rigolot, François. 1997. “Ekphrasis and the Fantastic Generation of an Aberration.” Comparative Literature 49 (2): 97–112.10.2307/1771340Suche in Google Scholar

Rogers, Pat. 2004. The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest Iconography, Pageant and Prophecy in Popes Early Work. Newark: University of Delaware Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Rowland, Beryl. 1970. “Melville’s Waterloo in ‘Rich Man’s Crumbs.’” Nineteeth-Century Fiction 25 (2): 216–221.10.2307/2932990Suche in Google Scholar

Sandor, Andras. 1991. “Myths and the Fantasti.” New Literary History 22 (2): 339–358.10.2307/469042Suche in Google Scholar

Scherb, Victor I. 2002. “Assimilating Giants: The Appropriation of Gog and Magog in Medieval and Modern England.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (1): 59–84.10.1215/10829636-32-1-59Suche in Google Scholar

Simms, Norman. 1978. “The English Mummer’s Play.” Folklore 89 (2): 166–178.10.1080/0015587X.1978.9716105Suche in Google Scholar

Simpson, Jacqueline and Steve Roud. 2000. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Sklar, Susanne M. 2011. Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603145.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar

Spooner, B. C. 1965. “The Giants of Cornwall.” Follkore 76 (1): 16–32.10.1080/0015587X.1965.9716983Suche in Google Scholar

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, N.Y.Suche in Google Scholar

Tooman, William A. 2011. Gog of Magog: Reuse of Scripture and Compositional Techniques in Ezekiel 38–39. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.10.1628/978-3-16-151752-5Suche in Google Scholar

Travis, William. 1999. “Representing ‘Christ as Giant’ in Early Medieval Art.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 62 (2): 167–189.10.2307/1482979Suche in Google Scholar

Westrem, Scott D. 1998. “Against Gog and Magog.” In Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, edited by Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, 54–75. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.10.9783/9781512808018-006Suche in Google Scholar

Wolfe, Peter. 1976. “England’s Greatest Tourist and Tourist Attraction: Andrew Sinclair’s Gog, Magog (1967, 1972).” In Old Lines, New Forces: Essays on the Contemporary British Novel, 1960–1970, edited by Robert K. Morris, 151–180. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.Suche in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2016-4-27
Published in Print: 2016-5-1

©2016 by De Gruyter

Heruntergeladen am 30.1.2026 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jbr-2016-1003/html?lang=de
Button zum nach oben scrollen