The Flight Of The Wild Gander A Skeleton Key Study Guide

This Skeleton Key Study Guide to Joseph Campbell's The Flight of the Wild Gander lets you read Campbell alongside a Campbell expert, focusing on the origins of myth and the enduring power of metaphor and symbols. In this helpful guide, you'll find chapter summaries, notable quotes, reading suggestions, essay and discussion topics, and prompts for creative projects. The Joseph Campbell Foundation's Skeleton Key Study Guides offer entryways into the work of Joseph Campbell for teachers, students, and myth-minded readers. Written by a contemporary expert in myth, this guide will help you discover the joy of Campbell's insights so you can apply them to your life.

Portions of this book appeared in a somewhat modified form in The Reader's encyclopedia of American literature (T.Y. Crowell, 1962) and in Benet's reader's encyclopedia, 3d ed. (Harper and Row, 1987). Some 1,500 entries are new; those that are not new have been revised and updated. The scope is American literature from the period of European exploration to the 1990s, with emphasis on the US but including extensive coverage of Canada and Latin America. Entries include writers and writings, literary groups and movements, newspapers and other periodicals, and literary terms; also within the alphabetical arrangement are broad historical and topical essays. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as ''other people's religion.'' But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment - or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss. In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic bestselling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and dialogues, which highlight his remarkable storytelling and ability to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and the quest for transformation. Here he anchors mythology's symbolic wisdom to the individual, applying the most poetic mythical metaphors to the challenges of our daily lives. Campbell dwells on life's important questions. Combining cross-cultural stories with the teachings of modern psychology, he examines the ways in which our myths shape and enrich our lives. He explores the many insights of Carl Jung; the notion of self as the hero; and how East and West differ in their approaches to the ego. The book also includes an extensive question-and-answer session that ranges from mythological readings of the Bible to how the Hero's Journey unfolds for women. With his usual wit and insight, Campbell draws connections between ancient symbols and modern art, schizophrenia and the Hero's Journey. Along the way, he shows how myth can help each of us truly identify and follow our bliss.

"Sacred Mysteries" explores the myths and folk tales about marriage bequeathed to society by ancestors. The book retells and analyzes these myths and tales of marriage and relationships which involve a hero's journey to the other world.

This charming travelogue from William Henry Hudson, expert birdwatcher and renowned chronicler of English country life, gives readers unparalleled access to the quaint rhythms of village existence at the turn of the twentieth century. These essays and observations will please readers who have a love for English culture and the great outdoors.

One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill’s poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill’s work – not just in The Changing Light at Sandover, where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet’s books, before and after that central text. By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill’s work.

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of "Finnegans Wake" - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of "Finnegans Wake." The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify -- and clarify -- its complex web of images and allusions. "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" is the latest addition to the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" series.