Author: Judith Yarnall Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252063565 Category : Circe (Greek mythology) in literature Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Beginning with a detailed study of Homer's balance of negative and positive elements in the Circe-Odysseus myth, Judith Yarnall employs text and illustrations to demonstrate how Homer's Circe is connected with age-old traditions of goddess worship. She then examines how the image of a one-sided "witch," who first appeared in the commentary of Homer's allegorical interpreters, proved remarkably persistent, influencing Virgil and Ovid. Yarnall concludes with a discussion of work by Margaret Atwood and Eudora Welty in which the enchantress at last speaks in her own voice: that of a woman isolated by, but unashamed of, her power.
Author: Madeline Miller Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 0316556335 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
This #1 New York Times bestseller is a "bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story" that brilliantly reimagines the life of Circe, formidable sorceress of The Odyssey (Alexandra Alter, TheNew York Times). In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child -- not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power -- the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus. But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love. With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world. #1 New York Times Bestseller -- named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, People, Time, Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, Newsweek, the A.V. Club, Christian Science Monitor, Refinery 29, Buzzfeed, Paste, Audible, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Thrillist, NYPL, Self, Real Simple, Goodreads, Boston Globe, Electric Literature, BookPage, the Guardian, Book Riot, Seattle Times, and Business Insider.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The myth of Circe and Odysseus has been told, interpreted and retold from Homer's time to the present. This thesis begins with a detailed study of Homer's balancing of positive and negative elements of the myth and argues that Homer's Circe is connected with age-old traditions of goddess worship, particularly of Artemis of Ephesus. Chapters III and IV investigate the cultural context in which the purely negative Circe of the Homeric allegorists developed and how this allegorical Circe affected works by other ancient writers, particularly Virgil and Ovid. Later chapters demonstrate how this negative allegorical view of Circe prevailed through the Renaissance and seventeenth century, as evidenced in mythographies, Calderon's plays and by Spenser's Acrasia. The study concludes that allegorical interpretations of the Circe myth were founded on body-soul dualism, so that not until this belief is questioned and abandoned by Joyce and Atwood in the twentieth century are more original and/or positive Circes found.
Author: Jonathan Lee Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0525658505 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
An exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, about one man's rise to fame and fortune, and his mysterious murder—“engrossing” (Wall Street Journal), “immersive” (The New Yorker), and “seriously entertaining” (The Sunday Times, London). Andrew Haswell Green is dead, shot at the venerable age of eighty-three, when he thought life could hold no more surprises. The killing—on Park Avenue in broad daylight, on Friday the thirteenth—shook the city. Born to a struggling farmer, Green was a self-made man without whom there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him that now, in the hour of his death, may finally break free. A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed, a murder that made a private man infamous, and a portrait of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him—yet enlarged it.
Author: Margaret George Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0698184769 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 530
Book Description
The New York Times bestselling and legendary author of Helen of Troy and Elizabeth I now turns her gaze on Emperor Nero, one of the most notorious and misunderstood figures in history. Built on the backs of those who fell before it, Julius Caesar’s imperial dynasty is only as strong as the next person who seeks to control it. In the Roman Empire no one is safe from the sting of betrayal: man, woman—or child. As a boy, Nero’s royal heritage becomes a threat to his very life, first when the mad emperor Caligula tries to drown him, then when his great aunt attempts to secure her own son’s inheritance. Faced with shocking acts of treachery, young Nero is dealt a harsh lesson: it is better to be cruel than dead. While Nero idealizes the artistic and athletic principles of Greece, his very survival rests on his ability to navigate the sea of vipers that is Rome. The most lethal of all is his own mother, a cold-blooded woman whose singular goal is to control the empire. With cunning and poison, the obstacles fall one by one. But as Agrippina’s machinations earn her son a title he is both tempted and terrified to assume, Nero’s determination to escape her thrall will shape him into the man he was fated to become—an Emperor who became legendary. With impeccable research and captivating prose, The Confessions of Young Nero is the story of a boy’s ruthless ascension to the throne. Detailing his journey from innocent youth to infamous ruler, it is an epic tale of the lengths to which man will go in the ultimate quest for power and survival.
Author: Elliott B. Gose, Jr. Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 1487597703 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
James Joyce gave a life to Ulysses which is still felt today, after the shock of its realism and the dislocation of its techniques have been absorbed into the traditions they helped to establish. This study demonstrates the sources of that life, how Joyce's characters go through the conflicts he himself experienced and how Joyce was concerned not only with the grotesque potential of life but also with its comic dimension, attempting to transmit that 'feeling of joy' which he adopted early as his artistic commitment. Joyce's belief in the malleability and resilience of man's physical and spiritual nature attracted him to the transformation process as a technique for fiction and as an expression of his belief that we need to be linked with both our higher and lower natures, that the soul is transformed by its immersion in the life of the body. Integrating the views of Giorgano Bruno and Sigmund Freud into his thought and art, Joyce balanced the grotesque and the comic, the realistic and the idealistic, the psychological and the spiritual. Professor Gose traces in detail the development of the two important transformation processes in which Joyce involved Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. He also demonstrates Joyce's conception of the artist as necessarily involved in such a process himself. Joyce understood the psychopathology of everyday life; he also came to value and make a central concern of his art mankind's residence in the matrix of the bodily functions. Grotesque physical transformations are an important part of Ulysses. In the Nighttown episode Joyce combined the grotesque with the comic to purge Bloom's emotions, and the reader's. Essential as purging was to Joyce, however, he used it only as a preparation for the joyful affirmation of the last two episodes. Joyce reconciles his reader to the comedy of life by providing a cosmic view of our connection with the stars and our own corpuscles, with an eternal process in which our spirits naturally progress through all the forms of the universe. Elliott Gose offers a brilliant interpretation of this high and humane vision, and the transformation processes through which it is expressed.
Author: Robert Tindall Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 159477501X Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
Reveals the striking parallels between indigenous cultures of the Americas and the ancient Homeric world as well as Tolkien’s Middle Earth • Explores the shamanic use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey and the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien • Examines Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism • Reveals how the Odyssey emerged precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. The native way of viewing the world--that is, understanding our cosmos as living, sentient, and interconnected--can be found hidden throughout Western literature, beginning with the very origin of the European literary tradition: Homer’s Odyssey. Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine healers in North and South America, the authors explore the use of healing songs, psychoactive plants, and vision quests at the heart of the Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tolkien’s final novella, Smith of Wootton Major. The authors examine Odysseus’s encounters with plant divinities, altered consciousness, animal shapeshifting, and sacred topography--all concepts vital to shamanism. They show the deep affinities between the healing powers of ancient bardic song and the icaros of the shamans of the Amazon rain forest, how Odysseus’s battle with Circe--wielder of narcotic plants and Mistress of Animals--follows the traditional method of negotiating with a plant ally, and how Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead signifies the universal practice of the vision quest, a key part of shamanic initiation. Emerging precisely at the rupture between modern and primal consciousness, Homer’s work represents a window into the lost native mind of the Western world. In this way, the Odyssey as well as Tolkien’s work can be seen as an awakening and healing song to return us to our native minds and bring our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
Author: Meg Mitchell Moore Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0385540051 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
From the bestselling author of Vacationland comes a novel that perfectly captures the mania of the college admissions process as a seemingly perfect family comes undone by a few desperate measures, a long-buried secret—and a teenage girl's application to Harvard. “A fun, fast-paced, completely engrossing tale of a California family trying to get their eldest daughter into Harvard.... Brilliant and enjoyable on every level.” —Elin Hilderbrand, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 28 Summers The Hawthorne family has it all: great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of northern California, and three charming kids with perfectly straight teeth. Then comes eldest daughter Angela’s senior year of high school. Suddenly, everyone is floundering. As Angela writes and rewrites her application for Harvard—her father's alma mater—and struggles to maintain her position as valedictorian, Nora Hawthorne’s career hits a rough patch, taking her away from a newly distracted husband and uncharacteristically anxious younger daughters. And as the secrets everyone has been keeping will come to light, it sets the family on a final collision course that will force them to reevaluate, with humor and heart, the value of achievement.
Author: Judith Yarnall
Author: Madeline Miller
Author: Clare Carroll
Author: 
Author: Jonathan Lee
Author: Margaret George
Author: Ovid
Author: Elliott B. Gose, Jr.
Author: Robert Tindall
Author: Meg Mitchell Moore