Here are 100 books that The Book of Marvels and Travels fans have personally recommended if you like
The Book of Marvels and Travels.
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I first became interested in the history of the British Empire as an undergraduate. Understanding this history helped me relate my parents’ experiences growing up in a postcolonial nation with the history of the United States, where I grew up. As an academic historian, my research and teaching emphasize connections—between disparate places, between the past and present, and between our personal experiences and those of people born in distant times and places. My first children’s book allowed me to translate my scholarly work for a young audience. I hope this list of books that inspire my approach to history encourages your own investigations of imperialism and its pasts!
Reading Edward Said’s book as an undergraduate expanded my intellectual horizons and made me want to be a historian. Said showed that empire not only included the events—war, exploitation, extraction—that happened “out there” but also shaped metropolitan ways of knowing about and relating to areas of the world under colonial domination.
Said shows us that the power to know about a place and its people and to shape how that place and its people are known was central to the consolidation of imperial rule in the nineteenth century and its continuance in the twentieth.
More than that, however, Said showed the fundamental continuity between forms of knowledge in the past and structures of imperial power in the present. Imperialism is an unfinished history.
The seminal work that has redefined our understanding of colonialism and empire, with a preface by the author
'Stimulating, elegant and pugnacious' Observer 'Magisterial' Terry Eagleton
In this highly-acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West's romantic and exotic picture of…
Growing up, I rewatched Star Wars until I wore out my VHS tape. I read every Dragonlancenovel. I played a bit of D&D. When I got to college, I finally was allowed work on things that interested me. I found Art History, dove into Medieval Studies, and, in grad school, got serious about monsters. Monster Studies didn’t exist, but books were out (especially by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), and my advisor encouraged me to follow my passions. My 15-year-old self would be astonished to learn that I’d get to read monster books, study monster art, and watch monster movies as a job!
This is a brilliant, wide-ranging, deeply-sourced study of the dynamics that underpinned and justified early modern colonization of the Americas. Mandeville’sBook of Marvels and Travels is the prehistory of the horrors of colonization; the sources at the heart of Davies’s study are colonization’s architecture: maps, book illustrations, freestanding prints, published texts, letters, journals, and on. With nuance and care, Davies rewrites the intellectual history of this period, confronting the dehumanizing, demonizing, monsterizing visual and textual rhetoric of colonial enterprises (which directly contributed to large-scale violence), but also looking carefully at nuances, differences, and shifts in this rhetoric over the course of the Renaissance.
Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could - or should - be converted or enslaved, maps…
Growing up, I rewatched Star Wars until I wore out my VHS tape. I read every Dragonlancenovel. I played a bit of D&D. When I got to college, I finally was allowed work on things that interested me. I found Art History, dove into Medieval Studies, and, in grad school, got serious about monsters. Monster Studies didn’t exist, but books were out (especially by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), and my advisor encouraged me to follow my passions. My 15-year-old self would be astonished to learn that I’d get to read monster books, study monster art, and watch monster movies as a job!
I have used this book many times in courses on the history of monsters and on monster movies. Carrol is a philosopher, and the book is written with exacting clarity. It is primarily about the genre of horror, but as Carrol writes, “monsters are central to horror.” Therefore, the author sets out both to define the generally indefinable category of “monster” and to analyze how we respond to them when they appear in fictional narratives. If you’ve ever wondered why a werewolf is a monster but Chewbacca isn’t, this is the book to read!
Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want…
Growing up, I rewatched Star Wars until I wore out my VHS tape. I read every Dragonlancenovel. I played a bit of D&D. When I got to college, I finally was allowed work on things that interested me. I found Art History, dove into Medieval Studies, and, in grad school, got serious about monsters. Monster Studies didn’t exist, but books were out (especially by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), and my advisor encouraged me to follow my passions. My 15-year-old self would be astonished to learn that I’d get to read monster books, study monster art, and watch monster movies as a job!
This one is the closest to my own areas of research. Strickland and I are both medieval art historians interested in how images not only reflect cultural ideas about othered peoples and the production of otherness, but also how images are central to thegeneration of these ideas. In this well-illustrated book, she examines a wide range of medieval Christian images that demonize groups—particularly Jews and Muslims, but really, all those who were not normative European Christians. I’ve returned to this book’s arguments many times over the years, and every time, I learn something anew.
During the crusades, Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols were branded enemies of the Christian majority. Illustrated with strikingly imaginative and still disturbing images, this book reveals the outrageously pejorative ways these rejected social groups were represented - often as monsters, demons, or freaks of nature. Such monstrous images of non-Christians were not rare displays but a routine aspect of medieval public and private life. These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.Debra Higgs Strickland introduces and decodes images of the…
I never outgrew the curiosity of wanting to know more about the things we fear. Plenty of monsters are just neat! But the more you learn about them, whether they’re animals like bears and sharks or figures of myth like werewolves and dragons, the more interesting they become. I wanted to take audiences deep inside a skin unlike their own so they could understand how it feels to be cast out and how much a monster might look down on us. Because the more you look at monsters, the more you recognize us in them.
One of the classic novels about monsters having internal lives. Grendel doesn’t even survive the first half of the Beowulf poem.
But what was his life like? This creature who went into rages over music and merriment? This outsider who clearly had no one to commune with? Where there could just be pathos, Gardner injects surprising dorkiness and humor that further round out Grendel’s existence. And there’s a huge bonus in the poem’s dragon also showing up as an utter weirdo neighbor.
This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic.
"An extraordinary achievement."—New York Times
The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This is the novel William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."
I am an Associate Professor of medieval history at Robinson College in the University of Cambridge. One exciting aspect of research about early medieval Britain is that there is always more to discover and understand, whether from artefacts being uncovered in archaeological excavations (like the Staffordshire Hoard), or from manuscripts that languish in archives and libraries across Britain without a modern translation and commentary. The books on this list—which offer insights into different aspects of early British life—are some of those that have captivated me most over my years of reading.
In this sparkling book, Eleanor Parker combines lyrical prose with learned observations, to enable us to access how those in early medieval England felt about the different seasons of the year, and indeed how they connected with nature in general.
With astute readings of early poetry and prose texts, Parker reawakens the everyday life of the Anglo-Saxons while at the same time showing us our roots.
Winters in the World is a beautifully observed journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England, exploring the festivals, customs and traditions linked to the different seasons. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including poetry, histories and religious literature, Eleanor Parker investigates how Anglo-Saxons felt about the annual passing of the seasons and the profound relationship they saw between human life and the rhythms of nature. Many of the festivals we celebrate in Britain today have their roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, and this book traces their surprising history, as well as unearthing traditions now long…
To experience another's thoughts and emotions, one first has to feel them. Eyes, lips, tongue, and teeth are involved before the brain/heart can engage. Translation of poetry is the same. My mother has sung Chinese poetry to me since forever, and English poetry came alive for me through verse speaking. I studied and taught as I wrote for many years. I cannot say I find my way into every poem I come across, but the poems I translate are ones I know and love. That is why I am passionate about translation. For me, it is not a secondary experience but a primary, primal performance art!
That I would love a poem written/translated by Seamus Heaney did not come as a surprise to me, but that it is Beowulf, a poem/story steeped in the Germanic warrior culture and soaked in blood that enthralled me, did surprise me.
I do not remember the occasion that prompted my reading, but even as I opened the book to its Introduction, and read “...And now this is ‘an inheritance’ --/Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked/ In the long ago, yet willable forward...Again and again and again,” I could not put it down.
In fact, you might say, it is not the story but the voice of the poet and how he brought this ancient language and people back to life that compelled me to read on. Of course, the voice is that of the poet of “Digging,” as he traces his roots back to these unlikely ancestors.
Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift.
The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels between this story and the history of the…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
I am generally not a big fan of hardcore academic theory, but this collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen gave me a steady stream of "aha!" moments when I first read it about twenty years ago.
I struggled a bit with some of the jargon here, not to mention the fact that it only deals with monsters in the Western tradition, but I know of no better book for helping readers understand why humans create (and need) monsters, what roles monsters play in affirming (and undermining) social norms, and what the study of monsters can reveal about the anxieties and fault-lines in the cultures that spawn them. “Monsters are our children,” Cohen writes at one point: that still blows my mind after two decades of chewing on it.
Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In viewing the monstrous body as metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of very real fears and desires, signs of cultural unease that pervade society and shape its collective behaviour. Through a sampling of monsters as a conceptual category, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies…
One of my favorite sections in the library is the collections of folk and fairy tales. Especially the lesser-known tales. My novel, Vasilisa, is inspired by the Russian folktale Vasilisaand Staver, plus my question of “how did Vasilisa get so strong?” I love combining folk tales with extensive research of the culture and history of their settings, as well as delving into characters who have vastly different experiences than mine. And I love reading character and detail-rich novelizations of traditional tales. It was difficult to pick only five novels based on lesser-known fairy tales. Enjoy, then go find some others!
I literally guffawed as I read this—enough times that my kids begged me to read it to them (which I did). This retelling of Beowulf played with expectations, twisting and turning in unexpected ways. The characters were fully fleshed out, with plenty of faults and quirks. No one was who I thought they were. Intrigue, magic, and stubborn independence mixed to make this delightful tale.
Plagued by misfortune, Ingrid Norling treks into the woods to clear her head. She emerges a monster-slayer, the shaken executioner of a creature so ferocious that even the king's strongest warriors could not destroy it. In a land that reveres swords and worships strength, this accidental heroism earns Inge an audience at court and an ill-fated prize: King Halvard impulsively adopts her and names her as his heir.
Under constant guard to prevent her escape, Inge confronts the ignoble underbelly of the royal court: a despotic king, a clueless princess, a proud warrior, and a dangerous intrigue. As secrets unravel…
Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I loved this book because it illuminated Tolkien’s lifelong fascination with Beowulf, probably his greatest influence. The translation is good, but the commentary is better, and the inclusion of two short works, Sellic Spell and the Lay of Beowulf, showed me Tolkien’s delight in “re-tellings.”
His creative genius was seldom far removed from his scholarly work.
The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication.
This edition is twofold, for there exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection has been made, to form also a commentary on the translation in this book.
