The book uses literary criticism to discuss themes and ideas present in select anime titles and attempts to categorise anime into three types - apocalyptic, festival, and elegaic. The book is split into five sections. In the first, Napier asks why anime is important as a topic of study. In the second, Napier looks at the representation of the human body in anime, looking at "monstrous adolescents", pornographic anime and cyborgs. In the third, Napier looks at representations of females, the girl, the magical girl and magical girlfriends. In the fourth section, Napier examines historical-themed anime.
Bowers presents and discusses three distinct variants - magic realism, magical realism, and marvellous realism - and she does so without undue pedantry. She also distinguishes magic(al) realism from surrealism, the fantastic, and science fiction. By way of illustration and application of its theoretrical principles, the book contains relatively extended and constructive discussions of works of, inter alia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende (principally "The House of Spirits"), Salman Rushdie (mainly "Midnight's Children"), Toni Morrison (chiefly "Beloved"), Gunther Grass ("The Tin Drum"), and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Product Description: Magical Realism in West African Fiction focuses on the cultural politics of magical realism, as exemplified in the fiction of Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana and contextualizes their fiction within current debates and theories around the 'postcolonial' globally. Providing a thoughtful introduction to magical realism as a genre, Brenda Cooper uses Cheney-Coker, Okri and Laing to discuss the particular and distinct intervention of magical realism in a West African context. She examines the narrative techniques of novels that mingle the dimensions of magic, myth and historical reality, and addresses their position in relation to the more explicitely nationalist agendas of the realism of Achebe and others.
Magic in Ancient Egypt The Egyptians were famous in the ancient world for their knowledge of magic. Religion, medicine, technology, and what we would call magic coexisted without apparent conflict, and it was not unusual for magical and "practical" remedies for illness, for example, to be used side by side. Everyone resorted to magic, from the pharaoh guarding his country with elaborate magical rituals to the expectant mother wearing amulets to safeguard her unborn child. In this book, Geraldine Pinch examines the connections between myth and magic and the deities--such as the goddess Isis, and the protective lion-demon Bes--who had special magical importance. She discusses the techniques of magic, its practitioners, and the surviving magical texts, as well as the objects that were used in magic: figurines, statues, amulets, and wands. She devotes a chapter to medicine and magic and one to magic and the dead. Finally, Dr. Pinch shows how elements and influences from Egyptian magic survived in or were taken up by later societies, right down to our own century.
