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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa and the Fonte Arethusa site mutually reinforce one another through romanticization and obfuscation, offering a case study of how nature narratives shape cultural memory, tourism, and perceptions of the past.

Paper long abstract

On Ortigia, a small island off the coast of Syracuse in Sicily, Italy, there is a spring. The Fonte Arethusa, is a clear, cold, freshwater spring that runs out from underground and into the Mediterranean Sea just steps away from the spring. Steeped in myth and legend, the spring is most deeply tied to the Ancient Greek Myth of Alpheus and Arethusa.

Alpheus and Arethusa, presents a beautiful love story between a river god and a nymph. However, upon reflection from a contemporary understanding of consent, this story more closely aligns with themes of sexual coercion and violence. In this paper, I explore the interplay between the romanticization of the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa, and the romanticization of the historic site of the Fonte Arethusa in Ortigia.

Using interdisciplinary perspectives, I explore how the place and its accompanying myth enable bad practices. In the story these are exemplified by romanticizing ideas such as non-consensual pursuit. In the place it is environmental and cultural ramifications of tourism on the area surrounding the natural historic site. This both parallel and intertwined example of romanticism and obfuscation — where myth and site reinforce one another — offers a unique lens for examining how nature narratives continue to shape cultural memory, tourism, and our understanding of the past.

Please consider this proposal under the FNLM committee.

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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the "natural" cruelty that stems from roles assigned to women in Qissah Chhabili Bhattiyari (1864). Also known as the "Tale of the Deceitfulness of Women", the qissah pits the tenacity of the women characters against the sordid helplessness of the hero for whom they fight.

Paper long abstract

(Folk Narrative, Literature, and Media Panels)

Since its first known publication in 1864, Qissa Chhabili Bhattiyari (“Chhabili the Innkeeper”) has circulated in multiple versions and genres, including a versified adaptation published in 1869 as Qissa Fareb-un-Nisa (The Tale of the Deceitfulness of Women). This is a story in which the tenacity and ingenuity of the female protagonists—Chhabili and Bichhittar—are set against the passivity and helplessness of the supposed “hero,” Zaman Shah, for whom they struggle. As literary theorist Kumkum Sangari has observed, “misogyny provides the structure of coherence” to Qissa Chhabili Bhattiyari. Yet the qissah simultaneously reveals how the women’s resourcefulness does not stem from an essentialised or “natural” femininity but from their social positioning—particularly the differences of class and status that shape their agency. The narrative does not overtly moralise but instead juxtaposes the women’s active strategies with Zaman Shah’s inertness and lack of resolve.

This paper examines how the text constructs what may be read as a “naturalised” cruelty rooted in prescribed social roles—sex worker/innkeeper versus wife—where the latter enjoys moral and financial support, while the former is denied respect or even the right to life after a decade-long relationship with the prince.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the supernatural figure of the sea king, in Swedish author Helena Nyblom’s 1910 fairy tale, “Agneta and the Sea King,” complicates traditional gender dynamics and offers an ecocritical critique of human dominance of the natural world. [Please consider this paper for FNLM]

Paper long abstract

Helena Nyblom’s 1910 Swedish literary fairy tale, “Agneta and the Sea King,” is a retelling of a well-known Scandinavian ballad (A47), which tells the story of a mortal woman who is kidnapped by a supernatural sea king and lives with him at the bottom of the sea, bearing him seven children, until the day she hears the sound of church bells and returns to her life on land, refusing to return to the sea king and her underwater children.

While there are several notable literary rewritings of this ballad, Nyblom’s is of particular interest for the way her tale complicates the gender dynamics we tend to associate with mermaid tales, and for how she uses the hybrid figure of the merman to depict the troubled relationship between humans and the natural world. Nyblom represents the sea king as an erotic yet sympathetic figure, which is made all the more apparent in John Bauer’s evocative illustrations which accompanied the original publication of the tale. Bauer and Nyblom’s depiction of the sea king as highly eroticized yet deserving of sympathy exists in tension with Agneta’s character, whose ultimate escape from the sea king and abandonment of her maternal role, also present her as a compelling counterexample to dominant narratives of womanhood, for which maternal self-sacrifice was a defining characteristic. Ultimately, this paper will examine how Nyblom’s rewriting of the traditional ballad challenges conventional gender roles, while simultaneously posing an eco-critical critique of human dominance over the natural world.