Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood
Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood

Author: Kathleen Wall

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1988-07-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0773561560

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Kathleen Wall traces the myth through fifteen works of English, American, and Canadian literature, providing a fresh, feminist reading of these narratives. Among the works analysed are selections by Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, and George Elliot. The resulting text reveals many facets of the realities of women's experience from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. And ultimately, Wall shows rape to be an expression of dominance rather than lust, giving increased support to the definition suggested by feminists. Wall demonstrates that the Callisto myth is a powerful archetype which illustrates both the victimization of women and their search for independence and autonomy, an archetype that should not be ignored by modern women.

Revisiting Rape in Antiquity
Revisiting Rape in Antiquity

Author: Susan Deacy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 135009921X

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How did the Greeks and Romans perceive rape? How seriously was it taken, and who were seen as its main victims? These are two central questions that Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds (1997), edited by Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce, aimed to approach in twelve chapters. Setting out to understand if the ancients had a concept of rape and how it was understood through different angles – including legal, social, cultural and historiographical – Rape in Antiquity made an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on sexual violence in the ancient world, impacting upon the development of new approaches in the decades that followed its publication. Revisiting Rape in Antiquity: Sexualised Violence in Greek and Roman Worlds maps out the influence of Rape in Antiquity while exploring how far cultural changes since the 1990s have reshaped the scholarly landscape. This collection, comprising chapters by established scholars and early career researchers from many countries, provides a new window into sexual – and sexualized – violence. Covering a long chronology, this book journeys from Homer to Byzantium, to modern receptions, to the analysis of wartime rape, ancient Greek tragedy, classical myth, how stories involving rape are retold for children, ancient law and rhetoric, classical art, Ovid, Late Antiquity, modern literature, comic books and cinema. This book is the culmination of a rich scholarly inheritance, setting out new perspectives that will hopefully inspire researchers for decades to come.

A Comparative Guide to Sartrean and Deleuzean Selves in Modernist and Post-Modernist Fiction
A Comparative Guide to Sartrean and Deleuzean Selves in Modernist and Post-Modernist Fiction

Author: Onur Ekler

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-07-12

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1527572307

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This book provides insights into the maze of ‘know thyself’ through a carefully detailed, comparative study of the Sartrean no-self and the Deleuzean rhizomic self. It is informative, argumentative and rich in literary context, and mainly focuses on the shift in the notion of self from Sartre’s elegiac, suicidal and nihilistic tone seen pervasively in modernist fiction to the celebratory, Deleuzean self in postmodernist fiction. To trace this shift, the book presents a comparative analysis of selected novels, showing that authors like Bellow and Atwood have adopted a more positive attitude toward the self similar to the Deleuzean rhizomic self, while authors like Hedayat and Beckett have more reductionist, decadent, nihilistic views on the self, like the Sartrean no-self. Moreover, as argued in the cases of the protagonists in the selected novels, this book further asserts that the Deleuzean rhizomic self might be seen as a possible alternative to help one survive in times of crisis, in contrast to the nihilistic Sartrean no-self.

Tiresian Poetics
Tiresian Poetics

Author: Ed Madden

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780838639375

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"Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed andembodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has come to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualities." "This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian andmodernist writers reimagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or perfonnative power in figures of sexual difference - most often a feminized, often homosexual malebody, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature and Culture
Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature and Culture

Author: Roberta Sabbath

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009-09-30

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 9047430964

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Contemporary sacred text scholarship has been stimulated by a number of intersecting trends: a surging interest in religion, sacred texts, and inspirational issues; burgeoning developments in and applications of literary theories; intensifying academic focus on diverse cultures whether for education or scholarship. Although much has been written individually about Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an, no collection combines an examination of all three. Sacred Tropes interweaves Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an essays. Contributors collectively and also often individually use mixed literary approaches instead of the older single theory strategy. Appropriate for classroom or research, the essays utilize a variety of literary theoretical lenses including environmental, cultural studies, gender, psychoanalytic, ideological, economic, historicism, law, and rhetorical criticisms through which to examine these sacred works.

Volume 3: Kierkegaard and the Roman World
Volume 3: Kierkegaard and the Roman World

Author: Jon Stewart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1351874632

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While Kierkegaard's use of the Greek authors, particularly Plato and Aristotle, has attracted considerable attention over the years, his use of the Roman authors has, by contrast, remained sadly neglected. This neglect is somewhat surprising given the fact that Kierkegaard was extremely well read in Latin from his early youth when he attended the Borgerdyd School in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard's interest in the Roman authors is perhaps best evidenced by his book collection. In his private library he had a long list of Latin titles and Danish translations of the standard Roman authors in any number of different genres. His extensive and frequent use of writers such as Cicero, Horace, Terence, Seneca, Suetonius and Ovid clearly warrants placing them in the select group of his major sources. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that Kierkegaard made use of the Roman sources in a number of different ways. His readings from the Borgerdyd school seem to have stuck with him as an adult. He constantly refers to Roman authors, such as Livy, Nepos, and Suetonius for colourful stories and anecdotes. In addition, he avails himself of pregnant sayings or formulations from the Roman authors, when appropriate. But his use of these authors is not merely as a rhetorical source. He is also profoundly interested in the Roman philosophy of Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Similarly, just as he is fascinated by Tacitus' portrayal of the early Christians, so also he is amused by the humour of Terence and Apuleius. In short, the Roman authors serve to enrich any number of different aspects of Kierkegaard's authorship with respect to both content and form.

New World Myth
New World Myth

Author: Marie Vautier

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0773516697

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In this comparative study of six Canadian novels Marie Vautier examines reworkings of myth in the postcolonial context. While myths are frequently used in literature as transhistorical master narratives, she argues that these novels destabilize the traditional function of myth in their self-conscious reexamination of historical events from a postcolonial perspective. Through detailed readings of François Barcelo's La Tribu, George Bowering's Burning Water, Jacques Godbout's Les Têtes à Papineau, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre, and Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People, Vautier situates New World myth within the broader contexts of political history and of classical, biblical, and historical myths.

Transformative Change in Western Thought
Transformative Change in Western Thought

Author: Ingo Gildenhard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 1351538721

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This groundbreaking volume maps the shifting place and function of marvelous transformations from antiquity to the present day. Shape-shifting, taking animal bodies, miracles, transubstantiation, alchemy, and mutation recur and echo throughout ancient and modern writing and thinking and continue in science fiction today as tales of gene-splicing and hybridisation. The idea of metamorphosis lies in uneasy coexistence with orderly world views and it is often cast out, or attributed to enemies. Augustine and the church fathers consider shape-shifting ungodly; Enlightenment thinkers suppress alchemy as unscientific; genetically-modified wheat and stem-cell research are stigmatised as unnatural. Yet the very possibility of radical transformation inspires hope just as it frightens. A provocative, theorising, trans-historical history, this book ranges across classics, literature, history, philosophy, theology and anthropology. From Homer and Ovid to Proust and H. P. Lovecraft and through figures from Proteus to Kafka's Fly and toSpiderman, four historical surveys are combined with nine case studies to show the malleable, yet persistent, presence of transformation throughout Western cultural history.

A Web of Fantasies
A Web of Fantasies

Author: Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0814209998

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"Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism, and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid's Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid's epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid's constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who "sees" the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation)." "The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid's epic."--BOOK JACKET.

Emyr Humphreys
Emyr Humphreys

Author: Diane Green

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1783163690

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This book is an examination of the novels of Emyr Humphreys in the light of his ideas on Wales: Welsh history, Welsh culture and the importance of a separate Welsh identity. It explores Humphreys’ practice in the light both of his own theories of culture and fiction and of a variety of models derived from postcolonial theory. Its main conclusions are that there are two particular techniques, the use of Welsh history and of Celtic myth, that have proved particularly central to Humphreys’ purposes throughout his career. These have consistently been the principal ways in which he foregrounds for the reader both what it means to be Welsh and the importance, for the nation, of maintaining an understanding of its heritage. And both these key strategies of his fiction should, it is argued, be read as typical postcolonial devices.