The dragon : fear and power /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Arnold, Martin, 1951- author.
Imprint:	London, UK : Reaktion Books, 2018.
Description:	328 pages ; 25 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Dragons. Dragons in literature. Dragons in motion pictures. Dragons.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11615216

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	1780238975 9781780238975
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	Dragons are a global phenomenon, one that has troubled mankind for thousands of years. 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 those dragon-women posing a threat to male authority, dragons have 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 to overcome them, to appease them or in some way to assume their power as our own. How can this be explained? Is it our need to impose order on chaos in the person of a dragon-slaying hero? Is it our terror of Nature 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? Martin Arnold traces the history of ideas about dragons, from the earliest of times to Game of Thrones, and asks what exactly it might be in our imaginations that appears to have necessitated such a creature.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Origin of Dragons
1. Dragons in Greek and Roman Mythology
2. Dragons in the Bible and Saints' Lives
3. The Germanic Dragon, Part 1: Old Norse Mythology and Old English Literature
4. The Germanic Dragon, Part 2: Sagas of Ancient Times
5. Dragons in Bestiaries and Celtic Mythology
6. Asian and East Asian Dragons
7. Dragons in the Anti-establishment Folktale
8. European Dragons as Fictions and Facts: From Medieval Romance to the Nursery Dragon
9. The Old Dragon Revives: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
10. 'A Wilderness of Dragons'
11. George R.R. Martin's Dragons and the Question of Power
Conclusion: The Dragon and Fear
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

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