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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 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 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.
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.
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.
In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.
In the first book to take D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems as its starting point, Bethan Jones adopts a broadly intertextual approach to explore key aspects of Lawrence's late style. The evolution and meaning of the poems are considered in relation to Lawrence's prose works of this period, including Sketches of Etruscan Places, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Apocalypse. More broadly, Jones shows that Lawrence's late works are products of a complex process of textual assimilation, as she uncovers the importance of Lawrence's reading in mythology, cosmology, primitivism, mysticism, astronomy, and astrology. The result is a book that highlights the richness and diversity of his poetic output, also prioritizing the masterpieces of Lawrence's mature style which are as accomplished as anything produced by his Modernist contemporaries.
Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft is an exploration of witchcraft in the literature of Britain and America from the 16th and 17th centuries through to the present day. As well as the themes of history and literature (politics and war, genre and intertextuality), the book considers issues of national identity, gender and sexuality, race and empire, and more. The complex fascination with witchcraft through the ages is investigated, and the importance of witches in the real world and in fiction is analysed. The book begins with a chapter dedicated to the stories and records of witchcraft in the Renaissance and up until the English Civil War, such as the North Berwick witches and the work of the ‘Witch Finder Generall’ Matthew Hopkins. The significance of these accounts in shaping future literature is then presented through the examination of extracts from key texts, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Middleton’s The Witch, among others. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts to a consideration of the Romantic rediscovery of Renaissance witchcraft in the eighteenth century, and its further reinvention and continued presence throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the establishment of witchcraft studies as a subject in its own right, the impact of the First World War and end of the British Empire on witchcraft fiction, the legacy of the North Berwick, Hopkins and Salem witch trials, and the position of witchcraft in culture, including filmic and televisual culture, today. Equipped with an extensive list of primary and secondary sources, Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft is essential reading for all students of witchcraft in modern British and American culture and early modern history and literature.
Musical Receptions of Greek Antiquity: From the Romantic Era to Modernism is a rich contribution to a topic of increasing scholarly interest, namely, the impact of Greek antiquity on modern culture, with a particular focus on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of essays offers a more comprehensive interdisciplinary examination of music’s interaction with Greek antiquity since the nineteenth century than has been attempted so far, analysing its connotations and repercussions. The volume sheds light on a number of hitherto underexplored case studies, and revisits and reassesses some well-known instances. Through scrutiny of a wide range of cases that extend from the Romantic era to experimentations of the second half of the twentieth century, the collection illuminates how the engagement with and interpretation of elements of ancient Greek culture in and through music reflect the specific historical, cultural and social contexts in which they took place. In analysing the multiple ways in which Greek antiquity inspired Western art music since the nineteenth century, the volume takes advantage of current interdisciplinary developments in musicology, as well as research on reception across various fields, including musicology, Slavic studies, modern Greek studies, Classics, and film studies. By encompassing a wide variety of case studies on repertories at the margins of the Western European art music tradition, while not excluding some central European ones, this volume broadens the focus of an increasingly rich field of research in significant ways.
'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements—'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'. The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, offering focused, nuanced engagements with the pleasures and challenges offered by particular styles of thinking and writing. The final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions: the places in which poems were encountered; the poetic representation and embodiment of various sites and spaces; the location of the 'Victorian' alongside other territories and nationalities; and debates about the place - and displacement - of poetry in Victorian society. This Handbook is designed to be not only an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, but also a landmark publication—provocative, seminal volume that will offer a lasting contribution to future studies in the area.