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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy
Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy
Anthony Purdy
Within the narrative poetics of the archaeological find, accounts of the discovery of beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe constitute a particularly complex, well-defined and resonant subgenre. A reading of the genre’s founding text, P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, reveals a repertoire of tropes and topoï that will inform subsequent fictional treatments of bog body finds. Arguing that the poetic specificity of the bog body lies in its extraordinary capacity to abolish temporal distance and mediate between past and present, this essay seeks to define the figure as a special kind of chronotopic motif, or …
The Bog Body As Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies In Heaney And Tournier, Anthony Purdy
The Bog Body As Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies In Heaney And Tournier, Anthony Purdy
Anthony Purdy
The sometimes beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies that used to turn up from time to time in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe have moved and intrigued writers since P.V. Glob published his classic archaeological account, The Bog People, in 1965. Locating the specificity of the literary bog body in its ability to compress time, to render the past visible in the present, the article seeks to read the figure as a mnemotope, defined provisionally as any chronotopic motif which manifests the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the …