Usage in Literature and Popular Culture
In fantasy stories and popular culture, a coven is a gathering of witches to work spells in tandem. Such imagery can be traced back to Renaissance prints depicting witches and to the three "weird sisters" in Shakespeare's play Macbeth. More orgiastic witches' meetings are also depicted in Robert Burns' poem "Tam o' Shanter" and in Goethe's play Faust. Movie portrayals have included, for example, Suspiria, Rosemary's Baby, The Covenant, Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, The Craft, Coven and Paranormal Activity 3. In television, covens were portrayed in the U.S. supernatural drama Charmed and the HBO series True Blood.
In novels such as The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice and the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, covens are families or unrelated groups of vampires who live together.
Read more about this topic: Coven
Famous quotes containing the words usage, literature, popular and/or culture:
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)