‘Goblins, owles and sprites’: discerning early-modern English preternatural beings through collocational analysis
Using the tools of collocational analysis, we explore the distribution and lexical relations of fairy, goblin, imp, and cognate terms within a corpus of approximately 17.6 million words of early-modern English. We found that imp, incubus, and familiar have well-circumscribed associations and are res...
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| Contributors: | |
| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
[2014]
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| In: |
Religion
Year: 2014, Volume: 44, Issue: 4, Pages: 547-572 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
English language
/ Literature
/ Supernatural being
/ Demonology
/ Superstition
/ History 1500-1750
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| IxTheo Classification: | AG Religious life; material religion KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history KBF British Isles |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Using the tools of collocational analysis, we explore the distribution and lexical relations of fairy, goblin, imp, and cognate terms within a corpus of approximately 17.6 million words of early-modern English. We found that imp, incubus, and familiar have well-circumscribed associations and are restricted to specific genres. However, goblin and fairy often appear in definitional or synonymizing phrases (e.g., ‘the fairies are spirits’), or, in contrast, are used in ‘indiscriminate pairings’ (e.g., ‘ghosts and goblins’) that serve to index a twilight domain of the spooky, the eerie, the unknown. We argue that the study of such preternatural beings is properly the study of rhetorical patterns. Goblins and their kin function as sites of contestation about other definitional schema: superstition, religion, magic. |
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| ISSN: | 0048-721X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2014.886631 |