Amaltea. Revista de mitocrítica

Hubris and Nemesis: the Myth of Oedipus and Identity in Crossed: Wish You Were Here

Jaime Segura San Miguel — 2024-02-19

The themes of past sins have occupied our collective imagination since the dawn of humankind. The ways in which characters are faced with their nemesis have changed throughout history, but the structure of the myth permeates our culture even nowadays. In this essay, Shaky from Simon Spurrier’s Crossed: Wish You Were Here is analysed and compared to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to determine if this myth still accurately represents some of our oldest fears, if its structure still serves the purpose of identifying anxieties in our culture, and it the Oedipal process can help explain Shaky’s search for identity.

Rewriting the Myth of Atalanta: Cross-Dressing and Gender Equality in Emily Hauser’s For the Winner

Daniel Nisa Cáceres — 2024-02-28

This article studies Emily Hauser’s For the Winner (2017), a contemporary reimagining of the myth of Atalanta. This novel belongs to a women-authored literary mode that gives prominence and a voice to classical female characters and myths. Close examination of the politics of cross-dressing, as well as how Atalanta’s mythic identity is reconstructed as a heroine undaunted by gender lines reveals that Hauser’s approach constitutes a central site for ascribing meanings of determination, agency, and gender equality, thus culturally repositioning the male-centredness of her canonical representations and providing a feminist reinscription of the myth.

The mystery of Medea: the original meaning of the character in literature and cinema

Encarnación Fernández Gómez — 2024-06-25

Within cinematographic art – unlike literary art – the character of Medea has been brought to the screen in the absence of condemnatory meanings of a moral nature. The primordial essence of the myth of Medea in the cinema is presented unrelated to the philosophical, scientific and rational point of view, since its ultimate meaning escapes even the literary language itself. Certainly, the most outstanding cinematographic creators have given life to this mythological figure in relation to the ineffable, that is, as an imaginary archetype that produces meaning: united with the symbolic, the silence, mystery and art.

Narrativity and myth in epic fantasy open-world videogames. Textual, environmental and performative myths

Antonio Castro Balbuena — 2024-05-29

This essay studies narrativity and myth in the video game. With this objective, we explore the relevance of the narrative elements in this medium, such as the characters and the space, with the inclusion of a unique characteristic: the interaction. Based on the connection of the video game with space stories, such as epic fantasy, we delve into the relevance of myth in open-world video games to propose a classification of myths in this medium: textual myths, closer to tradition and expressed in verbal form; environmental myths, the result of the hypermedia condition of the video game and the player's archaeological behavior; and performative myths, created by the player with his decisions and movements. Finally, this proposal is developed through a brief analysis of two open-world video games: World of Warcraft and Dark Souls III.

“I was not a nobody, but no one knew what I was”: A Mother’s Reclamation of her Story in Madhavi S. Mahadevan’s Bride of the Forest

Mruthula J — 2024-10-28

The ideological stronghold of mythology in the cultural consciousness necessitates the production of counter-ideologies that decenter the normative narrative with more subversive and progressive tales. The story of Madhavi from the Indian epic Mahabharata is upheld as a tale of a devoted daughter who is blessed with a privileged womb, which is prophesied to give birth to great kings, and a boon of chirkaumya, the ability to regain virginity. Devoid of any rights over her own body, Madhavi becomes instrumental for Gaalav, the disciple of Vishwamitra, in fulfilling his promise of eight hundred white horses with black-colored left ears as gurudakshina (tradition of repaying one’s teacher) to his teacher. Her womb is bartered, allowing men to exchange her indefinitely as a commodity with utilitarian value. Her voice, desires and feelings are undermined by the structural needs of the masculine tale. This paper seeks to read the novel Bride of the Forest by Madhavi. S. Mahadevan in the context of motherhood studies and postfeminism through the examination of the character Madhavi. It inquires into the representation of the maternal figures who are mapped on a power spectrum to posit that both agency and victimhood co-exist in uncomfortable ways.

Ortiz-de-Urbina, Paloma y Macsotay, Tomas (eds.). Recepción de Richard Wagner y Vanguardia en las Artes Españolas. Mitos y Materialidades. Dykinson, 2024, ISBN: 978-84-1070-337-7, 389 pp.

Adrián Valenciano Cerezo — 2024-11-07

Vaz da Silva, Francisco. The Meanings of Enchantment. Wondertale Symbolism Revisited. The Kalevala Society, 2023. ISBN: 978-952-9534-05-0. 218 pp

Patricia Rojo Lemos — 2024-04-08

Mills, Kevin. Myths and Ancient Stories. Narrative, Meaning and Influence in the West. London. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 199 pp. ISBN. 978-1-350-34685-7

Pere Bescós — 2024-07-12