The Lost Girls

Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1930
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-90-420-2235-5
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 53, 356 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 581 g

Reihe: Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Radford, Andrew

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Rezeption, literarische Einflüsse und Beziehungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Excavating the Dark Half of Hellas
2. Divine Mother and Maid in Victoria Poetry
3. Hardy’s Tess: The Making and Breaking of a Goddess
4. ‘Gone to Earth’: Mary Webb’s Doomed Persephone
5. E. M. Forster and Demeter’s English Garden
6. Lawrence’s Underworld
7. Salvaging the Goddess of Wessex
Afterword
Select bibliography
Index