Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Stories centering on the lovelorn ghost (Mae Nak) and the magical monk (Somdet To) are central to Thai Buddhism. Historically important and emotionally resonant, these characters appeal to every class of follower. Metaphorically and rhetorically powerful, they invite constant reimagining across time.

Focusing on representations of the ghost and monk from the late eighteenth century to the present, Justin Thomas McDaniel builds a case for interpreting modern Thai Buddhist practice through the movements of these transformative figures. He follows embodiments of the ghost and monk in a variety of genres and media, including biography, film, television, drama, ritual, art, liturgy, and the Internet. Sourcing nuns, monks, laypeople, and royalty, he shows how relations with these figures have been instrumental in crafting histories and modernities. McDaniel is especially interested in local conceptions of being “Buddhist" and the formation and transmission of such identities across different venues and technologies.

Establishing an individual's “religious repertoire" as a valid category of study, McDaniel explores the performance of Buddhist thought and ritual through practices of magic, prognostication, image production, sacred protection, and deity and ghost worship, and clarifies the meaning of multiple cultural configurations. Listening to popular Thai Buddhist ghost stories, visiting crowded shrines and temples, he finds concepts of attachment, love, wealth, beauty, entertainment, graciousness, security, and nationalism all spring from engagement with the ghost and the monk and are as vital to the making of Thai Buddhism as venerating the Buddha himself.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Lady Gregory was one of the founders of the Irish National Theatre Society, the author of books on Irish folklore, and an important playwright. Her story of the revival of native drama for the Irish stage is told in Our Irish Theatre (1913). Her journals reveal her as courageous and honest, with the gift of bringing out the best in the many people she befriended, among them W. B. Yeats, whose close friend and collaborator she remained from their meeting in the 1890s. She directed the Abbey Theatre with him until her death and with him wrote the play Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902).

Her own, usually brief, plays were Irish legendary fantasies, patriotic historical dramas, and the comedies of peasant life for which she is best known. Simplicity, which Lady Gregory as a writer always sought, should not be confused with naivete. Her balanced dialogue and "constant stripping away of easy sentiment" have been commented on by her editor, Ann Saddlemyer. Among the eclectic Abbey Theatre playwrights, Lady Gregory was a source of unity and consistency.

(Bowker Author Biography)