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'The Atlantic as Mythical Space' is a study of medieval culture and its concomitant myths, legends and fantastic narratives as it developed along the European Atlantic seaboard. It is an inclusive study that touches upon early medieval Ireland, the pre-Hispanic Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, courtly-love France and the pagan and early-Christian British Isles. The obvious and consequential ligature that runs throughout the different sections of this text is the Atlantic Ocean, a bewildering expanse of mythical substance that for centuries fueled the imagination of ocean-side peoples. It analyzes how and why myths with the Atlantic as preferential stage are especially relevant in pagan and early-Christian western Europe. It further examines how prescientific societies fashioned an alternate cosmos in the Atlantic where events, beings and places existed in harmony with communal mental structures. It explores why in that contrived geography these societies' angels and monsters were able to materialize with wonderful profusion; it further analyzes how the ocean became a place where human beings ventured forth searching for explanations for what is essentially unknowable: the origins of the universe and the reason for our existence in it.
About the author
Alfonso J. García-Osuna has a Ph.D. in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from The City University of New York and a Post-Doctoral Certificate from the University of Valladolid (Spain). He is Professor of Romance Languages and in the Irish Studies Program, Professor in the Culture and Education Program and in the Honors College at Hofstra University. García-Osuna is the editor of the 'IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities', published six books, including one on the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, published numerous articles on Spanish and Latin American Literatures and op-ed analyses. He has also completed the pilgrimage Road to Santiago, from France to Compostela, seven times.
