The article is about the mythopoeic idea of unity and interrelation of the human being and the Cosmic life, and its interpretation given in the texts of W. Shakespeare’s works. The human being, as represented in W. Shakespeare’s works, can be considered on three levels: personal, social and cosmic. As a person, a Shakespearean character is defined not only by his / her mind only, but also by the body. In the plays we see individuals of different gender, age, health and appearance. All these characteristics are relevant to the behavior of the individual and the response they get. Shakespeare skillfully shows different affects, and some states that can be explained with the help of the modern notion of hormones. All this was quite revolutionary for his epoch. Thus a human being is described as a creature with the complex psycho physiological constitution. One of the most important words in this context is "heart" that unites both physical and spiritual spheres. It brings to memory Ukrainian tradition of Cordocentrism, especially in P. Yurkevich’s interpretation. The metaphor of "body" is sometimes used in the pays to describe a social unity. Shakespeare was not a revolutionary, or even a political radical. Sometimes he shows the common people as politically deluded and easily lead. But mostly the commoners are portrayed as persons possessing the common scene and the moral standards, that guarantee the return to norm after social and political upheavals. It is important to note, that Shakespeare shows the kings as persons with weaknesses and problems, who must work hard to keep themselves and their country in order. In many plays he makes his monarchs declare the principal equality of human beings, with all the social differences appearing as secondary and transitory characteristics. Moreover, the same can be said about all the differences, underneath which all the humans are basically the same creatures with the same wants. All of them can suffer and thus are worthy of sympathy. There are some hints that animals can also be seen in the same context. This thought foreshadows the contemporary notion of animal rights an human responsibility for the planet. On the Cosmic level, the human beings are shown as the integral parts of the greater whole. In many plays there are statements reflecting the medieval model of the Universe, which goes back to the mythopoeia. The basic concept is the interrelation between the state of a person, of social group and of the world. Both the nation and its ruler were hold responsible for the cosmic state of affairs. The violation of the "Truth of the King" may have lead to turning the country into the Wasteland. This important mythologeme underlies all the plot of "King Lear". Taking this into consideration helps us to understand many obscure points. One of them is the behavior of the protagonist, that was traditionally explained only as the complete unreason of a madman who in the times of crisis asks irrelevant questions. In truth, Lear asks about the cause of the apocalyptical storm, which, on his opinion, was the direct result of some great sin. It is very close to the Greek belief, reflected in Sophocles’ "Oedipus", where the plague was sent by gods to punish the ruler’s crime. This belief also explains why in all Shakespearean plays – again, most noticeably in "King Lear" – there is an obligatory explanation in the finale. All the characters must tell their story and their confessions should be taken as forming the part of one general story. Shakespeare shows that the truth must be known and upheld, whatever the cost. Only thus the normal personal, social and cosmic life can continue. It doesn’t mean that all the plays are what was in the Soviet tradition called the "optimistical tragedies". Sometimes the losses are too great and the future is dubious. But it is the revealing of the human and cosmic truth that makes any future possible. In "King Lear" we also see the non-Aristotelian formula of catharsis, that sums up all the meaning of the suffering and losses: a person must learn compassion to restore or compensate what was destroyed in the blind egotistical strife. All these deeper senses of the plays, revealed by means of applying the principles of culturological hermeneutics, reflect the vestiges of the ancient belief in the human responsibility for the general state of the world. Such ideas, discarded by the Modern European Rationalism, are re-actualized in our times of the global ecological crisis, that demands a new level of awareness and new struggle with the human selfishness on all the levels: personal, social and universal. Taking into consideration these hidden meaning allows us deeper understanding of the Shakespearean tragedy. It can have both theoretical and practical importance, the latter being connected with the outlook-forming role of art. In the post-soviet theatres there is a tendency to turn the tragedies into the absurdist plays. It is an easy way for a director. But now it is more important to show that something can be, and must be done.

This performance ethnography analyzes the means by which performers at Tampa, Florida‘s Bay Area Renaissance Festival constitute community and gender through performance. Renaissance Festivals are themed weekend events that ostensibly seek to allow visitors to experience life in an English Renaissance village. Beginning with the theoretical assumption that performance is constitutive of culture, community, and identity, and undergirded by David Boje‘s festivalism, Richard Schechner‘s restored behavior, Victor Turner‘s liminoid communitas and Judith Butler‘s performative agency, The Festival is explored as a celebratory community that engages in social change through personal transformation. Employing reflexive ethnography and narrative as inquiry, Chapter Two catalogues and analyzes a broad range of festival performances, from stage acts and handcraft production, to participatory improvisation, dance, and song. Playful and liminoid, these performances invite participants to make performance commitments and mutually to produce community through participative performance, celebratory objects, and the surrender of personal space. Chapter Three argues that performances of alternative masculinities at festival play out against the backdrop of R.W. Connell‘s heteronormative masculinities. These alternative performances break down social barriers, promote self-definition, and provide agency in the embodiment gendered experiences. Likewise, Chapter Four features Festival‘s feminine performances that reveal the community to be a ―wench‘s world‖ privileging Judith Butler‘s notion of performative agency in order to enable communities of difference. The Wench, the Queen, and the Pirate She- ing all embody feminine power and serve as archetypes of feminine narratives that privilege self-definition. This study demonstrates Festival to be a women-centered community that engages in a mythopoeia of feminist history. Acknowledging Festival as a multi-vocal community of mythopoets, this ethnography significantly extends the work of previous research on Renaissance Festivals. Rather than focusing on Festival performances as attempts at historical ―authenticity,‖ this study reveals Festival‘s mythological stance and the means by which performers embody mythology and archetype to their own purposes. Moving away from an audience centered discussion of performance, this study demonstrates how individual performers, through personal transformation, become agents of change through performance.

In the Western cultural tradition there is a particular aspect of consciousness discernable in certain fictive literature; mythopoeic literary consciousness (MLC), the evolution of which may be traced back to its earliest manifestation in the cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic period in Europe. Researchers agree that those cave paintings are indicative of shamanic activity, which suggests an interesting relationship between shamanic consciousness and MLC. This research investigates contemporary experiences of this relationship in the context of place and the Imaginal Realm using a combination of empirical and textual methods. The evolution of the narrative psyche is described; beginning with recent interpretations of the aetiology and meaning of the European Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings. Shamanism is then examined and linkages are made with subsequent esoteric traditions such as Gnosticism, Hermeticism, the Imaginal Realm of the Sufi mystics, and the Romantic Movement in European literature. The Imaginal Realm, as a metaphysical construct, is posited in relationship to de Chardin’s Noosphere, Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance, the Celtic Web of Wyrd and Jung’s Collective Unconscious. Empirical research is presented on contemporary expressions of this tradition. Three internationally recognised Australian authors, David Malouf, Thomas Keneally and Colleen McCullough, were either interviewed or completed a questionnaire on their backgrounds, the role of place relationships, states of consciousness when writing and reading, the role of literature and related questions. Five dedicated readers and two professionally credentialed practicing shamans completed similar questionnaires on their experiences and views on literature, the act of reading, and shamanic and creative consciousness. The responses are accompanied by textual analysis of the work of the three authors, drawing out themes of importance. Further discussion of the empirical and textual material in the context of broader literature establishes the epistemological dimensions of both mythopoeic literary consciousness and shamanic consciousness. The nature and relationship of consciousness and soul are examined from a perspective that unites them with the anima mundi and posits them in relationship with place and elsewhere-place. The concluding section revisits core themes to posit the mythopoeic writer and MLC within the heritage of a metaphysical tradition that delineates the existential boundaries of the psyche. It is argued that MLC is a manifestation of the narrative imperative of the psyche or soul to orientate itself along a place-elsewhere-place continuum, a continuum that parallels states of consciousness from the participation mystique to the de-centred self. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Cette thèse, au carrefour de la traductologie et des études littéraires, se présente sous la forme d’une étude de cas prenant pour point de départ les liens d’influence entre deux écrivains, l’Irlandais Lord Dunsany et l’Américain H. P. Lovecraft. Leurs œuvres se construisent autour de mondes fictionnels où se conjuguent panthéons originaux, visions oniriques et voyages fantastiques. Par une approche descriptive et contrastive, on se propose d’éclairer comment cette démarche mythopoétique fondatrice a également marqué les divers projets de traduction et retraduction qui se sont succédé sur un peu plus d’un siècle.Dans cette perspective, cette recherche se fonde sur une conception de la traduction au sens large comme réécriture et allie plusieurs points de vue (sociologique, culturelle, stylistique) afin d’analyser la manière dont ces œuvres et le mythe qu’elles véhiculent sont reçues et se transmettent. En effet, le mythe naît précisément de la répétition de récits sans cesse régénérés, laissant toujours place à la variation, et le plaisir du mythe vient en partie de ce que lecteur reconnaisse, dans l’histoire qu’on lui conte, un récit familier bien que renouvelé qui pourra faire naître en lui le désir de le transmettre à son tour en se l’appropriant.Il apparaît alors possible de distinguer la spécificité d’une traduction mythopoétique dans le cadre de ce pan particulier des littératures de l’imaginaire, et de mettre au jour une vision nouvelle du ludique en traduction : en faisant appel à la complicité de lecteurs-joueurs qui deviennent à leur tour agents de leur transmission et de leur réception dans le champ littéraire français, ces œuvres se font textes-mondes, s’ouvrent à la démultiplication, à la réécriture et au partage, et traduisent un désir d’enchantement participatif qui, jusqu’à aujourd’hui, n’a cessé d’aller croissant. / This dissertation stands at the crossroads of translation and literary studies and focuses on the case of two fantasy authors, Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft. One having inspired the other, they are both creators of fictional worlds marked by made-up cosmogonies, dream visions and fantasy journeys. Through comparison and contrast, we propose to highlight how the mythopoeic approach which their stories stem from has also shaped the various translation and retranslation projects in France over the past century.From this perspective, this research elaborates on a broad conception of translation as rewriting and relies on sociological, cultural and stylistic approaches in order to analyse how these works and the myth they convey have been received and transmitted. Indeed, myth is born from the endless repetition and regeneration of stories and includes variation as a characteristic; the pleasure derived from myth comes from the readers recognizing a familiar story under a new garment, before passing it on in their turn.It then becomes possible to delineate the specificity of mythopoeic translation as regards to this particular facet of fantasy literature, and to establish a new vision of play within translation: these works, triggering both attachment and complicity in readers who become players of a game of transmission, ensure their reception in the French literary field and become text-worlds. Demultiplied, rewritten, shared, they translate an evergrowing desire for participative enchantment.

Literary medievalism has always been critically controversial; it has often been dismissed as reactionary or escapist. This survey of major medievalist writers from America, England, Ireland and Iceland aims to demonstrate instead that medievalism is one of the characteristic literatures of modernity. Whereas realist fiction focuses on typical, plausible or common experiences of modernity, medievalist literature is anything but reactionary, for it focuses on the intellectual circumstances of modernity. Events such as the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, many political revolutions, the world wars, and the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and above all those of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), each sent out cultural shockwaves that changed western beliefs about the nature of humanity and the world. Thus, intellectual anachronisms pervade medievalist literature, as some of the greatest writers of modern times offer new perspectives on old legends. The first chapter of this study focuses on the impact of Darwin’s ideas on Victorian epic poems, particularly accounts of natural evolution and supernatural creation. The second chapter describes how late Victorian medievalists, abandoning primitivism and claims to historicity, pushed beyond the form of the retelling by simulating medieval literary genres. The third chapter crosses into the twentieth century and examines the relationship between the skepticism of a new generation of medievalist writers and their exploration of radical new possibilities in artificial mythology. The fourth chapter examines the gender dynamics of medievalist works, discussing how medievalist writers reinterpreted stock character types through metafiction. The final chapter’s focus is on war, propaganda, and human nature; it documents the iconoclastic trend in postwar medievalism, as writers examine the role of literature in encouraging nationalism and organized violence. Tying together the major threads of medievalism from the previous chapters, this final chapter chases the greatest shockwave of the twentieth century through inverted medieval landscapes where the author may be the greatest villain of all. Rejecting the critical Balkanization of medievalism, this study instead offers a unified view of nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses to northern legend, one which shows medievalism closely tracking the shocks of modernity. / October 2016

The thesis is organized as two sections of two chapters each: the first section establishes a theoretical framework of a broad and reinvigorated Christian sacramentality within which to situate the second—an investigation of the theories and practice of the mythopoeic art of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in this sacramental light. The first chapter acknowledges the thoroughgoing disenchantment of modernity, an effect traced to the vanishing of a sacramental understanding of the world, and then explores the history of the sacramental concept that would seek to be reclaimed and reconceived as a possible means of the re-enchantment of Western culture such as in the recent work of David Brown. An appreciative critique of Brown's work is offered in chapter two before proposing an alternative understanding of a distinctly Christian and reinvigorated sacramentality anchored in the Incarnation and operating by Transposition. A notion of sacramental vision is developed from the perceptual basis in its classic definitions, and a sacramental understanding of story is considered from a theological perspective on the infinite generativity of meaning in texts, along with recent theories of affect and affordance. The second half of the thesis expounds the views of mythopoeia held by Lewis and Tolkien in order to show how they are not only compatible with but lead to a sacramental understanding of story as developed in part one, with mythopoeia affording the recovery of a potentially transformative vision of reality, awakening it into focus in distinctly Christian ways (chapter three). The final chapter demonstrates how their mythopoeic theories are exemplified in their art, examining specific ways Till We Have Faces and The Lord of the Rings afford the recovery of a potentially transformative vision of various themes central to them. In closing it is suggested that such a sacramental understanding of story may contribute to the re-enchantment of Western culture, not to mention the re-mythologization and re-envisaging of Christianity, whose significance in these regards has been hitherto mostly unrecognized.

J.R.R. Tolkien was not only an author of fantasy but also a philologist who theorized about myth. Theorists have employed various methods of analyzing myth, and this thesis integrates several analyses, including Tolkien’s. I address the roles of doctrine, ritual, cross-cultural patterns, mythic expressions in literature, the literary effect of myth, evolution of language and consciousness, and individual invention over inheritance and diffusion. Beyond Tolkien’s English and Catholic background, I argue for eclectic influence on Tolkien, including resonance with Buddhism. Tolkien views mythopoeia, literary mythmaking, in terms of sub-creation, human invention in the image of God as creator. Key mythopoetic tools include eucatastrophe, the happy ending’s sudden turn to poignant joy, and enchantment, the realization of imagined wonder, which is epitomized by the character of Tom Bombadil and contrasted with modernist techno-magic seeking to alter and dominate the world. I conclude by interpreting Tolkien’s mythmaking as a form of mysticism.