The Image of the Feminine in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos

The Image of the Feminine in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos
Author: Anastasia Psoni
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2018-12-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1527523802

Modernism, as a powerful movement, saw the literary and artistic traditions, as well as pure science, starting to evolve radically, creating a crisis, even chaos, in culture and society. Within this chaos, myth offered an ordered picture of that world employing symbolic and poetic images. Both W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos embraced myth and symbols because they liberate imagination and raise human consciousness, bringing together humans and the cosmos. Being opposed to the rigidity of scientific materialism that inhibits spiritual development, the two poets were waiting for a new age and a new religion, expecting that they, themselves, would inspire their community and usher in the change. In their longing for a new age, archaeology was a magnetic field for Yeats and Sikelianos, as it was for many writers and thinkers. After Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of the Minoan Civilization where women appeared so peacefully prominent, the dream of re-creating a gynocentric mythology was no longer a fantasy. In Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the feminine figure appears in various forms and, like in a drama, it plays different roles. Significantly, a gynocentric mythology permeates the work of the two poets and this mythology is of pivotal importance in their poetry, their poetics and even in their life as the intensity of their creative desire brought to them female personalities to inspire and guide them. Indeed, in Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the image of the feminine holds a place within a historical context taking the reader into a larger social, political and religious space.

The Cambridge Guide to Homer

The Cambridge Guide to Homer
Author: Corinne Ondine Pache
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 974
Release: 2020-03-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1108663621

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

Useless Joyce

Useless Joyce
Author: Tim Conley
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487515499

Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten “uses” for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.

Cognitive Joyce

Cognitive Joyce
Author: Sylvain Belluc
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319719947

This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies. Cognitive Joyce presents Joyce's relationship to the scientific knowledge and practices of his time and examines his texts in light of contemporary developments in cognitive and neuro-sciences. The chapters pursue a threefold investigation—into the author's "extended mind" at work, into his characters' complex and at times pathological perceptive and mental processes, and into the elaborate responses the work elicits as we perform the act of reading. This volume not only offers comprehensive overviews of the oeuvre, but also detailed close-readings that unveil the linguistic focus of Joyce's drama of cognition.

The Shade of Homer

The Shade of Homer
Author: David Ricks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1989-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521366632

In exploring the significance of Homer for the poetry of modern Greece - benign shade or looming shadow? - Dr Ricks is tackling a theme that has implications for the study of poetic influence in general. In this 1989 book, he takes the work of Sikelianos, Cavafy and Seferis and subjects a selection of poems to a careful scrutiny. These poems are not imitations of Homer but fresh engagements with Homeric themes, and comparison of the modern versions with the original is found to be illuminating for the poets' methods of composition. Dr Ricks does not lose sight of the larger significance of his subject, and modern poets from outside Greece - Eliot and Pound, in particular - find their way into the discussion. All Greek is translated and the reader has no need to be a specialist in modern or in ancient Greek to find this study absorbing and instructive.

Builders of My Soul

Builders of My Soul
Author: Brian Arkins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780389209133

To Yeats, as well as to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and other major writers, as Erich Auerbach put it in Mimesis, "Antiquity means liberation and a broadening of horizons, not in any sense a new limitation or servitude." That is why Greco-Roman themes can be endlessly stimulating, why Yeats could call the Greek and Roman writers "the builders of my soul." Brian Arkin's thematic consideration of Yeat's subject matter under philosophy, myth, religion, history, literature, visual art, and Byzantium, allows us to see coherently how Yeats exploited this material and how, especially in his middle and later periods, he transformed and metamorphosed subject matter from Homer, Phidias, Plato, Plotinus, and Sophocles, and from the myths of Dionysus, Helen of Troy, Leda, and Zeus, to exemplify his central preoccupations. Irish Literary Studies Series No. 32.

Interweaving myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Interweaving myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries
Author: Janice Valls-Russell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2017-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526117711

This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity.

How Writing Works

How Writing Works
Author: Dominic Wyse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-11-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1107184681

Zusammenfassung: A history of writing -- Writing guidance -- Expert writers -- Creativity and writing -- Novice writers and education -- The process of writing

The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats

The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats
Author: Wit Pietrzak
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319600893

This book focuses on W. B. Yeats’s critical writings, an aspect of his oeuvre which has been given limited treatment so far. It traces his critical work from his earliest articles, through to his occult treatises, and all the way to his last pamphlets, in which he sought to delineate the idea of a literary culture: a community of people willing to credit poetry with the central role in imagining and organising social praxis throughout society. The chapters of this study investigate the contexts in which Yeats’s thought developed, his many disputes over the shape of Irish cultural politics, the future of poetry and the place literature occupies in the world. What transpires is an image of Yeats who is strung between the impulses of faith in the existence of a supernatural order and ironic scepticism as to the possibility of ever capturing that order in language. This study is distinguished by its grounding of Yeats's critical agenda in a broader context through textual analysis. In addition, it organises and systematises his conceptions of poetry and its social role through its approach to his criticism as a fully-fledged area of his artistic practice. The monograph has been written within the framework of the project financed by The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number DEC-2013/09/D/HS2/02782.