The lost girls : Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination, 1850-1930 / / Andrew Radford.
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. T...
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Superior document: | Textxet, 53 |
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Year of Publication: | 2007 |
Language: | English |
Series: | Text (Rodopi (Firm)) ;
53. |
Physical Description: | 1 online resource (357 p.) |
Notes: | Description based upon print version of record. |
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Summary: | 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. |
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Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
ISBN: | 1282265415 9786612265419 9401204667 1435611934 |
ISSN: | 0927-5754 ; |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
Statement of Responsibility: | Andrew Radford. |