No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock
by Marina Warner
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Description
In this work on the age old images and stories about frightening men the author goes beyond the terrain she covered in her previous book 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. The book 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 show more 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. The author 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 an analysis of material long overlooked by cultural critics, historians, and even psychologists, she revises our understanding of storytelling in contemporary culture, of masculine identity, racial stereotyping, and the dangerous, unthinking ways we perpetuate the bogeyman. show lessTags
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Member Recommendations
Rubbah Everything I've read by Warner has been excellent, but 'No Go' and 'Beast to the Blonde' are my favourites and if you like one, read the other.
Member Reviews
Why do we love being scared? What purpose does the bogeyman serve in our societies? This study of the bogeyman and other beasts who go bump in the night is fascinating, highly readable, and erudite.
Fear/Horror/Ghouls and ogres/Folklore > Psychological aspects
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Works Cited in Kevin Wetmore's Eaters of the Dead
61 works; 1 member
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Author Information
72+ Works 5,560 Members
Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a distinguished writer of fiction, criticism, and history.
Awards and Honors
Common Knowledge
- Epigraph
- Futile - the Winds - / to a Heart in Port - / Done with the Compass - / Done with the Chart -Emily Dickenson
As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo non intelligentia fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intellig... (show all)endo fit omnia). Perhaps the latter proposition is true than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and comprehends all things, but when he does not understand, he makes things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. -Giambattista Vico, Principles of New Science
When children, frightened of the wolf at the window, were asked what did it want to do, the little boy replied, "Gobble me up." The little girl said, "Let's ask it." -Darrian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They ... (show all)Post? - Dedication
- For Nick Groom
- First words
- This book began with the problem on men. -Preface
Think of a time near the beginning; not at the start of history, but beyond it, in that outer circles of retrospection where dates turn into foam towers of bubble-like zeros. -Prologue
No Go the Bogeyman is about fear; it faces one of the most everyday yet least examined of human feelings, and it describes three of the principal methods of coping with anxieties grounded in common experience, as well as the ... (show all)nameless terrors that come in the dark and assail the mind. -Introduction
In a poem written in Germany in 1782, the pot Goethe evoked the Erlking, or the King of the Alders, wooing a boy who was riding with his father through a dark forest: "You sweet child, come, come with me!" he calls out, "we s... (show all)hall play lovely games together, there are flowers of many colours by the water's edge, my mother has many garments of gold." -Chapter 1, 'Here Comes the Bogeyman!' - Canonical DDC/MDS
- 700.453
- Canonical LCC
- BF575.F2
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- Members
- 433
- Popularity
- 71,233
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.08)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 3
