Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937

Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 PDF Author: Joan DeJean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226141350
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.

Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937

Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 PDF Author: Joan DeJean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226141350
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.

Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937

Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 PDF Author: Joan DeJean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226141365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.

Sappho Is Burning

Sappho Is Burning PDF Author: Page duBois
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226167565
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation. How is it then, Page duBois asks, that this poet has come to signify so much? Sappho Is Burning offers a new reading of this archaic lesbian poet that acknowledges the poet's distance and difference from us and stresses Sappho's inassimilability into our narratives about the Greeks, literary history, philosophy, the history of sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject. In Sappho is Burning, duBois reads Sappho as a disruptive figure at the very origin of our story of Western civilization. Sappho is beyond contemporary categories, inhabiting a space outside of reductively linear accounts of our common history. She is a woman, but also an aristocrat, a Greek, but one turned toward Asia, a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy, a writer who speaks of sexuality that can be identified neither with Michel Foucault's account of Greek sexuality, nor with many versions of contemporary lesbian sexuality. She is named as the tenth muse, yet the nine books of her poetry survive only in fragments. She disorients, troubles, undoes many certitudes in the history of poetry, the history of philosophy, the history of sexuality. DuBois argues that we need to read Sappho again.

Reading Sappho

Reading Sappho PDF Author: Ellen Greene
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
Reading Sappho considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Essays are divided into four sections: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition", "Ritual and Social Context", and "Women's Erotics". Contributors focus on literary history, mythic traditions, cultural studies, performance studies, recent work in feminist theory, and more. A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Re-Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.

Re-Reading Sappho

Re-Reading Sappho PDF Author: Ellen Greene
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520206038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
The essays in this volume review the seemingly endless permutations wrought on Sappho through centuries of readings and re-writings.

Performing Antiquity

Performing Antiquity PDF Author: Samuel N. Dorf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019061210X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1930 investigates collaborations between French and American scholars of Greek antiquity (archaeologists, philologists, classicists, and musicologists), and the performing artists (dancers, composers, choreographers and musicians) who brought their research to life at the birth of Modernism. The book tells the story of performances taking place at academic conferences, the Paris Opéra, ancient amphitheaters in Delphi, and private homes. These musical and dance collaborations are built on reciprocity: the performers gain new insight into their craft while learning new techniques or repertoire and the scholars gain an opportunity to bring theory into experimental practice, that is, they have a chance see/hear/experience what they have studied and imagined. The performers receive the imprimatur of scholarship, the stamp of authenticity, and validation for their creative activities. Drawing from methods and theory from musicology, dance studies, performance studies, queer studies, archaeology, classics and art history the book shows how new scholarly methods and technologies altered the performance, and, ultimately, the reception of music and dance of the past. Acknowledging and critically examining the complex relationships performers and scholars had with the pasts they studied does not undermine their work. Rather, understanding our own limits, biases, dreams, obsessions, desires, loves, and fears enriches the ways we perform the past.

Women Writing Antiquity

Women Writing Antiquity PDF Author: Helena Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192697730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Women Writing Antiquity argues that the struggle to define the female intellectual in seventeenth-century France lay at the centre of a broader struggle over the definition of literature and literary knowledge during a time of significant cultural change. As the female intellectual became a figure of debate, France was also undergoing a shift away from the dominance of classical cultural models, the transition towards a standardized modern language, the development of a national literature and literary canon, and the emergence of the literary field. This book explores the intersection of these phenomena, analyzing how a range of women constructed the female intellectual through their reception of Greco-Roman culture. Women Writing Antiquity offers readings of known and less familiar works from a diverse corpus of translators, novelists, poets, linguists, playwrights, essayists, and fairy tale writers, including Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scud?ry, Madame de Villedieu, Antoinette Deshouli?res, Marie-Jeanne L'H?ritier, and Anne Dacier. Challenging traditionally formalist and source-text orientated approaches, the study reframes classical reception in terms of authorial self-fashioning and professional strategy, and explores the symbolic value of Latin literacy to an author's projected identity. These writers used reception of Greco-Roman culture to negotiate the value attributed to different genres, the nature of poetics, the legitimacy of varied modes of authorship, the qualities and properties of French, and even how and by whom these topics might be debated. Women Writing Antiquity combines a new take on the literary history of the period with a retelling of the history of the figure of the 'learned woman'.

Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho

Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho PDF Author: Jane McIntosh Snyder
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231099950
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
The lyrics of Sappho are the earliest surviving examples of explicitly homoerotic literature and have often been analyzed in terms of their revelations about the island society of Lesbos. This volume examines Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire. It focuses on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture.

Writing and Victorianism

Writing and Victorianism PDF Author: J.B. Bullen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317888472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
Writing and Victorianism asks the fundamental question 'what is Victorianism?' and offers a number of answers taken from methods and approaches which have been developed over the last ten years. This collection of essays, written by both new and established scholars from Britain and the U.S.A, develops many of the themes of nineteenth-century studies which have lately come to the fore, touching upon issues such as drugs, class, power and gender. Some essays reflect the interaction of word and image in the nineteenth-century, and the notion of the city as spectacle; others look at Victorian science finding a connection between writing and the growth of psychology and psychiatry on the one hand and with the power of scientific materialism on the other. As well as key figures such as Dickens, Tennyson and Wilde, a host of new names are introduced including working-class writers attempting to define themselves and writers in the Periodical press who, once anonymous, exercised a great influence over Victorian politics, taste, and social ideals. From these observations there emerges a need for self-definition in Victorian writing. History, ancestry, and the past all play their part in figuring the present in the nineteenth-century, and many of these studies foreground the problem of literary, social, and psychological identity.