The Modern Afterlives of Old Irish Travel Narratives : From Gulliver to Star Trek / Natalia I. Petrovskaia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Petrovskaia, Natalia I., author.

Series:

Literary Reception & Art Reception ; 1.

Literature and Cultural Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026

Literary Reception & Art Reception ; 1

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and Cultural Studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (0 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

From Gulliver to Star Trek

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2025.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book explores the reception of the medieval Irish tradition of fantastic journey tales in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels , C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , Umberto Eco's Baudolino , and the science fiction television franchises Star Trek and Stargate . In doing so, the book opens the door to a new history of literary reception, using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval texts. It aims to show that there is a family of texts produced in the post-medieval period that are heirs of the medieval Irish literary tradition of fantastic voyage narratives and that using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval works can open up new perspectives in our understanding of these works.

Contents:

Contents

Acknowledgements

Figures and Table

Abbreviations

1 Introduction: These Are the Voyages…

1.1 The Old Irish ‘Genre System’, Otherworlds, and Utopias

1.2 The Tropological Mode

1.3 The Intertextual Matrix

1.4 Structure and Route

2 C. S. Lewis, the Dawn Treader , and St Brendan

2.1 C. S. Lewis’s Dialogic Imagination

2.2 The Dawn Treader and Fourfold Interpretation

3 Umberto Eco, ‘Reality’ and Prester John

3.1 Creating and Following the Footsteps of Saint Brendan

3.2 Umberto Eco’s Construction of Space

3.3 Making the Incredulous Reader Believe in the Fantastic

4 Jonathan Swift, the Echtra and the Immram Tradition

4.1 Swift and Allegorical Reading

4.2 Swift’s Real-World Framework

4.3 Gulliver’s Islands and the Problems of Utopia

5 Star Trek as Immram , and ‘Space, the Final Frontier…’

5.1 Planets as Islands

5.2 ‘Optimism, Captain!’ Rowing-about with Cheer

5.3 These are the Immrama of the Starship Echtra

6 Stargate as an Echtra Narrative

6.1 Stargate ’s Planetary Otherworlds

6.2 Stargate Ustopias

6.3 Postcolonial Echtrai

7 Conclusion

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

90-04-73454-6

OCLC:

1528502914

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004734548 DOI