Amaltea. Journal of Myth Criticism

Simon Young & Davide Ermacora. The Exeter Companion to Fairies, Nereids, Trolls and Other Social Supernatural Beings. University of Exeter Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-80413-104-6. 274 pp.

2024-09-22T20:40:12+00:00

Edited by Allan E. C. Wright, Premodern Monsters: A Varied Compilation of Pre- modern Judeo-Christian and Japanese Buddhist Monstrous Discourses. Vernon Press, 2025, 206 pp., ISBN 979-8-8819-0141-7

2025-10-07T06:07:50+00:00

John Clark. The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-80413-136-7 . 260 pp.

2024-08-15T08:33:21+00:00

Editorial

2025-06-25T07:35:41+00:00

«The rainbow is enclosed in the coffin». Dissolving without a trace: remythologization in the work of Joan Miró

2025-07-11T11:22:15+00:00

In different spiritual traditions, the rainbow symbolises the relationship between heaven and earth, a key theme in Joan Miró’s pictorial work. According to the artist himself, his work pours a «sacred mythology». In one poem Miró writes: «the rainbow is enclosed in the coffin», as if evoking the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist practice of the dematerialisation of the gross physical body into the subtle «rainbow body» that the yogī achieves with death. An «escape into the absolute», into the lapis lazuli blue «perfect void», which requires before the gross body dissolves without trace: «one must cease to be Miro», «free oneself from the false self».

Myths in Philippe Le Guillou's initiatory triptych: about the new enchantment of the world through myths and great heroes

2025-06-23T07:52:30+00:00

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the study of the novels of the contemporary French writer Philippe Le Guillou. Thanks to the methodological basis of thematicism and the prism of mythocriticism combined with comparative literature, we outline here the main signs of the longing for a new enchantment of the world through the insertion of myths in his initiatory triptych formed by the novels Livres des guerriers d'or (1995), Les sept noms du peintre (1997) and Douze années dans l'enfance du monde (1999). The aim of the work is above all to reflect the author's personal strategy based on returning to the great stories with the great mythological or biblical heroes and thus underlining the ancestral wisdom and the relevance of the imaginary cultural heritage of the West as well as the spiritual dimensions of life.

The Orphic ‘fleeting glimpse’ in some of its Remediations

2025-11-21T10:37:53+00:00

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was revitalized and perpetuated during the first decades of the twentieth century in literature and other arts. Influenced by literature, painting and music, cinema has retold and re-enacted the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in many variations, from Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) to Jean Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy (1930-60). It is impossible to show the whole process of the myth’s trans-mediation, from orality to internet, but by revisiting the Orphic theme in some of its various modernist re-mediations and by analysing and comparing its pictorial and cinematographic expression we will gain insight not only into its adaptations and transformations, but also into the technology involved in these processes (media archaeology). My approach focuses on the technical reproducibility of the invisible, and analyses its pictorial, poetic and cinematographic expression in the cultural exchange between Rodin, Rilke and Cocteau.

Penelope within the postfeminist frame, contemporary retelling to the mythic figure through The Penelopiad, Margeret Atwood and The Memoirs of Helen, Amanda Elyot.

2025-10-30T07:12:28+00:00

Margaret Atwood’s Penelope (The Penelopiad) offers a reinterpretation which questions traditional epic values through a cynic narrative, full of autonomy, sarcasm and individualism. Standing out from her classical counterpart, Atwoods version reflects on the contradictions originated by the 2000’s postfeminism ambience, when femininity and autonomy were built around competitive dynamics and interiorized misogyny. Eliot’s Helen (The Memoirs of Helen) counterparts her as an exponent of critical, collective feminism that questions feminine arquetipes through the mythical structure. Revising its historical evolution, this works aims to understand each reinterpretation, as their place and significance in contemporary culture.

En mitad de tanto fuego by Alberto Conejero: Patroclus, protagonist of a new counter-epic

2025-10-20T06:06:48+00:00

This article explores the endurance of the Patroclus myth in Alberto Conejero’s play En mitad de tanto fuego. It begins by tracing the myth’s diffusion through a mythopoetic examination of its literary construction, before turning to a structural and symbolic analysis of the play’s sole character, Patroclus. By invoking collective memory, the figure of Patroclus condenses temporal opposites—past and present, beginning and end—emerging simultaneously as the assertion of a presence and the persistence of an absence. His final message is decidedly anti-war, thereby proposing a counter-epic of the soldier in love.