DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Spring Man

A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture

Petr Janecek author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Lexington Books

Published:11th Nov '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Spring Man cover

Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture deconstructs the nationalistic myth of Spring Man that was created after the Second World War in visual culture and literature and presents his original form as an ambiguous ghostly denizen of oral culture. Petr Janeček analyzes the archetypal character, social context, and cultural significance of this fascinating phenomenon with help of dozens of accounts provided by period eyewitnesses, oral narratives, and other sources. At the same time, the author illustrates the international origin of the tales in the originally British migratory legend of Spring-heeled Jack that reaches back to the second third of the 19th century and draws parallels between the Czech myth of spring man and similar urban phantom narratives popular in the 1910s Russia, 1940s U.S. and Slovakia, 1950s Germany, as well as other parts of the world.

ISBN: 9781666913750

Dimensions: 236mm x 158mm x 19mm

Weight: 494g

228 pages