No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock - Hardcover

Warner, Marina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374223017 ISBN 13: 9780374223014

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

An exciting new work, richly illustrated, on the age-old images and stories about frightening men.

In this provocative new work, Marina Warner goes beyond the terrain she covered in her widely praised From the Beast to the Blonde. She explores the darker, wilder realm where ogres and giants devour children, where bogeymen haunt the night and each of us must face our bugaboos. No Go the Bogeyman considers the enduring presence and popularity of figures of male terror, establishing their origins in mythology and their current relation to ideas about sexuality and power, youth and age.

Songs, stories, images, and films about frightening monsters have always been invented to allay the very terrors that our dreams of reason conjure up. Warner shows how these images and stories, while they may unfold along different lines--scaring, lulling, or making mock-always have the strategic, simultaneous purpose of both arousing and controlling the underlying fear. In a brilliant analysis of material long overlooked by cultural critics, historians, and even psychologists, Warner revises our understanding of storytelling in contemporary culture, of masculine identity, racial stereotyping, and the dangerous, unthinking ways we perpetuate the bogeyman.

About this title

Review:

Having previously examined the role of women in fairy tales in From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner now sets out on an equally eclectic study that was originally supposed to be about men, but instead became a treatise on the grotesque. Taking on everything from Zeus to Bluebeard, from Punch to the Teletubbies, she examines the ways in which we give voice to our fears in order to master--and even mock--them. In that light, her sections on the modern cultural transformation of children themselves into "little monsters" should prove quite interesting to readers of Joseph Campbell and other scholars who take erudite approaches to pop and folk culture.

About the Author:

Marina Warner is the author of novels and short stories as well as works of nonfiction. Her most recent books include From the Beast to the Blonde (FSG, 1995) and Wonder Tales (FSG, 1996). She lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0374223017
• ISBN 13: 9780374223014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 435