Overview

Tracks the history of concepts and practices associated with the physical crossroads in the early modern period Breaks new ground in the area of literary geography and enhances the historical understanding of the place of the crossroads in literary and cultural discourse Unifies various discourses of early modern culture and subjectivity in terms of the experience and understanding of the crossroads Locates issues around the ideology and experience of the road in one specific culturally significant place Focusing on the crossroads in the early modern period, this book deals with the literature and history of the physical crossroads: it's magical and religious encounters, rituals of transformation, binding of undesirable spirits, siting of gallows, associations with music, and links to ancient cosmology. Physical crossroads have been culturally vital sites where forces human, demonic and divine were felt to converge. Crossroads have seemed to render the boundaries between these spheres negotiable, subject to certain artifice and timing. They gave access to gods and facilitated deals with devils, they were potent sites for rituals intended to influence lovers or harm enemies and provided both a dramatic stage for communal activities and a burial ground for the unwanted dead cast out in ceremonies of the night.

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9781474499835

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Reviews

"""Bill Angus offers a rich and fascinating exploration of the symbolic potential of the uncanny points at which roads simultaneously meet and diverge, showing that whether as places for selling one's soul, burying the outcast dead, or encountering the supernatural, crossroads in the early modern imagination were charged and dangerous.? "" -Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University"

Author Information

Bill Angus is senior lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Massey University, New Zealand. He has published widely on early modern metadrama and the material conditions that generate it, on the artefacts of protection from evil, and on the historical roots of the mythology of popular music. His latest monograph A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture has been described as 'a rich and fascinating exploration of the symbolic potential of the uncanny points at which roads simultaneously meet and diverge, showing that whether as places for selling one's soul, burying the outcast dead, or encountering the supernatural, crossroads in the early modern imagination were charged and dangerous.'

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