Persephone Rises, 1860–1927

2016-12-05 Literary Criticism

Author : Margot K. Louis
Release : 2016-12-05
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 011/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Persephone Rises, 1860–1927 by : Margot K. Louis

Download or read book Persephone Rises, 1860–1927 written by Margot K. Louis. This book was released on 2016-12-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, the figure of Persephone rapidly evolved from what was essentially a decorative metaphor into a living goddess who embodied the most spiritual aspects of ancient Greek religion. In the first comprehensive survey of the Persephone myth in English and American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Margot Louis explores the transformation of the goddess to provide not only a basis for understanding how the study of ancient history informed the creation of a new spirituality but for comprehending the deep and bitter tensions surrounding gender that interacted with this process. Beginning with an overview of the most influential ancient texts on Persephone and references to Persephone in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Romantic period writing, Louis shows that the earliest theories of matriarchy and patriarchal marriage emerged in the 1860s alongside the first English poems to explore Persephone's story. As scholars began to focus on the chthonic Mystery cults, and particularly on the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, poets and novelists explored the divisions between mother and daughter occasioned by patriarchal marriage. Issues of fertility and ritual resonate in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Willa Cather's My Antonia, while the first advance of a neo-pagan spirituality, as well as early feminist critiques of male mythography and of the Persephone myth, emerge in Modernist poems and fictions from 1908 to 1927. Informed by the latest research and theoretical work on myth, Margot Louis's fascinating study shows the development of Victorian mythography in a new light; offers original takes on Victorian representations of gender and values; exposes how differently male and female Modernists dealt with issues of myth, ritual, and ancient spirituality; and uncovers how deeply the study of ancient spirituality is entwined with controversies about gender.

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics

2020-11-12 Literary Criticism

Author : Heather Bozant Witcher
Release : 2020-11-12
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 386/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics by : Heather Bozant Witcher

Download or read book Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics written by Heather Bozant Witcher. This book was released on 2020-11-12. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers a range of Pre-Raphaelite literary scholarship, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of Pre-Raphaelitism. The authors in this collection position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making, aiming to identify and explore the Pre-Raphaelites’ diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, gendered, and sacred. Each chapter examines how Pre-Raphaelitism takes up and explores modes of making and re-making identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even, time and space. Essays explore themes of formalist or prosodic approaches, expanded networks of literary and artistic influence within Pre-Raphaelitism, and critical legacies and responses to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and arts, codifying the methods, forms, and commonalties that constitute literary Pre-Raphaelitism.

Walter Pater and Persons

2024-06-20 Literary Criticism

Author : Stephen Cheeke
Release : 2024-06-20
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 27X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Walter Pater and Persons by : Stephen Cheeke

Download or read book Walter Pater and Persons written by Stephen Cheeke. This book was released on 2024-06-20. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.

The Demeter-Persephone Myth as Writing Ritual in the Lives of Literary Women

2017-01-06 Social Science

Author : Jana Rivers Norton
Release : 2017-01-06
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 469/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Demeter-Persephone Myth as Writing Ritual in the Lives of Literary Women by : Jana Rivers Norton

Download or read book The Demeter-Persephone Myth as Writing Ritual in the Lives of Literary Women written by Jana Rivers Norton. This book was released on 2017-01-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the life stories of Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Alice James, and Edith Wharton, whose individuation process mirrored Demeter/Persephone’s mythic journey from abduction and rage to purposeful reconciliation. These authors often courted humiliation and consequent exile by voicing what others did not want to acknowledge, yet each took restorative action to discover and preserve emotional and mental wellbeing. Writing during the 19th and early 20th centuries when an association between female authors and physical ailments, neurasthenia, hysteria, and other nervous complaints by the medical paternity reflected how society in general understood mental illness, as well as the narrative perceptions of women, Bishop, Woolf, James and Wharton, claimed personal autonomy by speaking truth about sorrow and suffering in their lives. Despite restrictions and limiting gender norms, each author continuously recast painful experiences of loss, abuse and mental illness, as fodder for the imagination to forge lasting literary careers. The book emphasizes the therapeutic value of narrative disclosure and its ability to yield a deeper understanding of the impact of childhood trauma and adversity on women writers, and how their creative response shaped modern culture. As such, it contextualizes trauma as lived experience for each writer, along with current research on early loss and mourning, childhood abuse, and family systems theory, in order to appreciate more fully how writing as ritual may help transform mental and emotional debility.

The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature

2020-11-21 Literary Criticism

Author : Natalie Rose Dyer
Release : 2020-11-21
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 136/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature by : Natalie Rose Dyer

Download or read book The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature written by Natalie Rose Dyer. This book was released on 2020-11-21. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on literary, cultural, and critical examples forming a menstrual imaginary—a body of work by women writers and poets that builds up a concept of women’s creativity in an effort to overturn menstrual prejudice. The text addresses key arbiters of the menstrual imaginary in a series of letters, including Sylvia Plath the initiator of ‘the blood jet’, Hélène Cixous the pioneer of a conceptual red ink and the volcanic unconscious, and Luce Irigaray the inaugurator of women’s artistic process relative to a vital flow of desire based in sexual difference. The text also undertakes provocative against-the-grain re-readings of the Medusa, the Sphinx, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Red Shoes, as a means of affirmatively and poetically re-imagining a woman’s flow. Natalie Rose Dyer argues for re-envisioning menstrual bleeding and creativity in reaction and resistance to ongoing and problematic societal views of menstruation.

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Persephone Rises, 1860–1927

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