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Author: Jana Rivers Norton
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jana Rivers Norton
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Get Book
Book Description
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.
Author: Josephine Donovan
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271072563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
A continuation of Josephine Donovan's exploration of American women's literary traditions, begun with New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, which treats the nineteenth-century realists, this work analyzes the writing of major women writers of the early twentieth century—Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow. The author sees the Demeter-Persephone myth as central to these writers' thematics, but interprets the myth in terms of the historical transitions taking place in turn-of-the-century America. Donovan focuses on the changing relationship between mothers and daughters—in particular upon the "new women's" rebellion against the traditional women's culture of their nineteenth-century mothers (both literary and literal). An introductory chapter traces the male-supremacist ideologies that formed the intellectual climate in which these women wrote. Reorienting Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow within women's literary traditions produces major reinterpretations of their works, including such masterpieces as Ethan Frome, Summer, My Antonia, Barren Ground, and others.
Author: Andrew Radford
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401204667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter’s loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts’s case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades, The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.
Author: Jana Rivers Norton
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527543404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This volume offers a critical yet empathic exploration of the ancient myth of Medea as immortalized by early Greek and Roman dramatists to showcase the tragic forces afoot when relational suffering remains unresolved in the lives of individuals, families and communities. Medea as a tragic figure, whose sense of isolation and betrayal interferes with her ability to form healthy attachments, reveals the human propensity for violence when the agony of unresolved grief turns to vengeance against those we hold most dear. However, metaphorically, her life story as an emblem for existential crisis serves as a psychological touchstone in the lives of early twentieth-century female authors, who struggled to find their rightful place in the world, to resolve the sorrow of unrequited love and devotion, and to reconcile experiences of societal abandonment and neglect as self-discovery.
Author: Elizabeth T. Hayes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813012629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Though Persephone resisted fiercely, Hades seized her and carried her off, screaming in shrill voice. Her cries echoed from the mountain peaks to the depths of the sea, and her noble mother Demeter heard her. "This book's originality rests upon its intertextual approach to some of the most powerful archetypes of Western literature. . . . A sample study of women's responses to well-entrenched Western patriarchal values."--Marcelle Maistre Welch, Florida International University "An exemplary model for the intersection of the feminist/literary/archetypal approaches. . . . All the essays [are] informative, well-substantiated, and interesting."--Kathleen Ashley, University of Southern Maine Images of Persephone have appeared in the works of male and female writers for hundreds of years. Because the story of Persephone and Demeter is so moving, embodying archetypes of the "loving and terrible" mother and the rite of passage for women in patriarchal cultures, the myth resonates throughout Western consciousness. These essays explore the myth through critical analysis of literary texts, the authors of which include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Atwood, Cixous, and Morrison. The essays converge at three important areas of study: the feminist/cultural, the archetypal, and the literary/textual. They explore women's relationships and experiences within patriarchal cultures that range from Homer's classical Greece to Cixous's postmodern France, from Chaucer's England to Alice Walker's contemporary America. Contents The Persephone Myth in Western Literature, by Elizabeth T. Hayes Chaucer's Use of the Proserpina Myth in "The Knight's Tale" and "The Merchant's Tale," by Marta Powell Harley "Like an Old Tale Still": Paulina, "Triple Hecate," and the Persephone Myth in The Winter's Tale by Janet S. Wolf Sexual and Artistic Politics under Louis XIV: The Persephone Myth in Quinault and Lully's Proserpine, by Michele Vialet and Buford Norman The Persephone Myth in Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, by Laura Laffrado Through the Golden Gate: Madness and the Persephone Myth in Gertrude Atherton's "The Foghorn," by Melissa McFarland Pennell "Lost" Girls: D. H. Lawrence's Versions of Persephone, by Virginia Hyde Ghosts of Themselves: The Demeter Women in Beckett, by Mary A. Doll Dark Persephone and Margaret Atwood's Procedures for Underground, by Eileen Gregory From Persephone to Demeter: A Feminist Experience in Cixous's Fiction, by Martine Motard-Noar "Like seeing you buried": Persephone in The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple, by Elizabeth T. Hayes Elizabeth T. Hayes is assistant professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, and has published in The Southern Literary Journal.
Author: Ruth Richards
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137557664
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
As human beings we all have creative potential, a quality essential to human development and a vital component to healthy and happy lives. However this may often remain stifled by the choices we make, or ways in which we choose to live in our daily lives. Framed by the “Four Ps of Creativity” – product, person, process, press – this book offers an alternative understanding of the fundamentals of ordinary creativity. Ruth Richards highlights the importance of “process”, circumventing our common preoccupation with the product, or creative outcome, of creativity. By focusing instead on the creator and the creative process, she demonstrates how we may enhance our relationships with life, beauty, future possibilities, and one another. This book illustrates how our daily life styles and choices, as well as our environments, may enable and allow creativity; whereas environments not conducive to creative flow may kill creative potential. Also explored are questions of ‘normality’, beauty and nuance in creativity, as well as creative relationships.
Author: Margot K. Louis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351912011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
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.
Author: Holly Blackford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113664427X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
In this book, Blackford historicizes the appeal of the Persephone myth in the nineteenth century and traces figurations of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades throughout girls’ literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illuminates developmental patterns and anxieties in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. The story of the young goddess’s separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is, at root, an expression of ambivalence about female development, expressed in the various Neverlands through which female protagonists cycle and negotiate a partial return to earth. The myth conveys the role of female development in the perpetuation and renewal of humankind, coordinating natural and cultural orders through a hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rite. Meanwhile, popular novels such as Twilight and Coraline are paradoxically fresh because they recycle goddesses from myths as old as the seasons. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.
Author: Anna-Carina Müller
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638034070
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 14
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Münster (Englisches Seminar), course: Canadian women’s writing: Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, language: English, abstract: This research paper endeavours to investigate the relation between Rachel Cameron, protagonist of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God, and the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Therefore, academic works are consulted as well as examples and citations from Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God are picked out, in order to confirm or emphasize certain aspects and ideas. First of all, some general facts of a mother-daughter relationship are given, in order to establish a relationship to the principal topic of this research paper, from Jungian theory to Eleusinian mysteries. To relate the myth of Demeter and Persephone to Rachel Cameron in an as detailed manner as possible to Rachel Cameron, there will, firstly, be an analysis of Persephone’s role in A Jest of God, by means of drawing parallels between Persephone and Rachel. Next, the close relation between life, death and fertility is to be investigated, in order to establish another relationship between myth and novel, and, further, it shall be investigated, in how far Demeter is represented in the protagonist Rachel and not only in her mother May. The last point will be the conclusion which summarises the most important findings of this paper and tries to answer the question in how far the myth of Demeter and Persephone is represented in Margaret Laurence’s protagonist Rachel Cameron. In her novel A Jest of God, Margaret Laurence obviously establishes a connection to the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. In opposition to the eternal dyad between mother and son, which, according to Adrienne Rich, is always the representation in divinity, sociology, art and psychoanalytic theory , Laurence, in her novel A Jest of God, narrates the story of the close bonding between Rachel Cameron and her mother May. According to Nancy Bailey, Laurence can be regarded as a Jungian writer: The parallels between the phases of Jung’s theory and of Laurence’s fiction reveal the novelist as spiritually akin to the psychologist; her work has the scope and articulation of a complete cultural myth which lends itself appropriately to Jungian analysis. The fact that Laurence creates a protagonist, in this case Rachel, who embodies some aspects of Jung’s idea of individuality , necessitates a closer look at Jung’s theories . Referring to the mother-daughter relationship, Jungians analyse archetypes and the Eleusinian mysteries , which directly lead to the main topic of this work: Greek mythology in Laurence’s A Jest of God.
Author: Holly Blackford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136644288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
This book explores the myth of Persephone and Demeter as it informs the development of a long discourse about civilization, the development of children, child psychology, and fantasy literature. The pattern in the myth of girls who descend into underworlds and negotiate a partial return to the earth is a marked feature of girls’ literature, and the cycle also reflects the change of seasons and fertility/death. Tracing the parallel between the myth and girls’ literature enables an understanding of how female development is mourned but deemed necessary for the reproduction of culture. Blackford looks at the function of toys in children’s literature as a representation of the myth’s narcissus, combining this approach with classic interpretations of the myth as expressive of female psychology, mother-daughter object-relations, hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rituals, transition from matriarchal to patriarchal order, and excursions into the creative/artistic unconscious. The story of Persephone’s separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is explored as an expression of ambivalence about female development in works such as Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King, Alcott’s Little Women, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Burnett’s The Secret Garden, White’s Charlotte’s Web, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Meyer’s Twilight, and Gaiman’s Coraline. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.
