Download or read book The Demeter Persephone Myth as Writing Ritual in the Lives of Literary Women written by Jana Rivers Norton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Lost Girls written by Andrew Radford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book After the Fall written by Josephine Donovan and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Long Journey Home written by Christine Downing and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the mother-and-daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone has seized the imagination of people in every age, from ancient times to the present. Considered today by many to be the archetypal myth for women, it touches on timeless themes in every life, such as the male-female relationship, love between women, initiations into puberty and old age, the mother-daughter bond, death, and ecological renewal. Christine Downing has combined essays, prose, poetry, and even performance art with her own insightful commentary to shed new light on the myth's ancient meanings and to offer new insights in its implications for contemporary men and women.
Download or read book The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother Monster and Muse written by Jana Rivers Norton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Myth of Persephone in Girls Fantasy Literature written by Holly Blackford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-04-23 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Persephone Rises 1860 1927 written by Margot K. Louis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Long Journey Home written by Christine Downing and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the mother-and-daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone has seized the imagination of people in every age, from ancient times to the present. Considered today by many to be the archetypal myth for women, it touches on timeless themes in every life, such as the male-female relationship, love between women, initiations into puberty and old age, the mother-daughter bond, death, and ecological renewal. Christine Downing has combined essays, prose, poetry, and even performance art with her own insightful commentary to shed new light on the myth's ancient meanings and to offer new insights in its implications for contemporary men and women.
Download or read book Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction written by Anway Mukhopadhyay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-cultural study that explores and redefines what philosophy, philosophizing, and philosophers are through the lens of literature. The academic discipline of philosophy may tell us, too rigidly, what a philosopher is or should be; but fictional narration often upholds the core conundrums of humankind in which philosophy germinates. This collection of essays explores whether a study of 'philosophers' at a planetary scale, or at least on a broad cross-cultural spectrum, can decouple philosophy from its academic aspect and lend it a more inclusive domain. Contributors to this volume play with three conceptual poles, making them interact with each other and get modified through this interaction: 'fiction', 'narrative' and 'philosopher'. How do these three terms get semantically modified and broadened in scope when we speak of the figures of philosophers in imaginative writing? How do these terms assume different connotations in different cultural contexts, interacting with the multiplicity of not just 'thought', but also the media and tools of 'thought'? Do we always think only rationally? Or do we also think with and through emotively powerful images, symbols and tropes? In the end, Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction insists on the need to 'de-elitize' and democratize the concept of a 'philosopher' by reflecting on the possibility of seeing a philosopher as one who sees things clearly, from any vantage point.
Download or read book Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind written by Ruth Richards and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Rachel Cameron and the myth of Demeter and Persephone written by Anna-Carina Müller and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Finding Persephone written by Maryline G. Parca and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the latest research in gender studies, history of religion, feminism, ritual theory, performance, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, Finding Persephone investigates the ways in which the religious lives and ritual practices of women in Greek and Roman antiquity helped shape their social and civic identity. Barred from participating in many public arenas, women asserted their presence by performing rituals at festivals and presiding over rites associated with life passages and healing. The essays in this lively and timely volume reveal the central place of women in the religious and ritual practices of the societies of the ancient Mediterranean. Readers interested in religion, women's studies, and classical antiquity will find a unique exploration of the nature and character of women's autonomy within the religious sphere and a full account of women's agency in the public domain.
Download or read book Demeter and Persephone written by Tamara Agha-Jaffar and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2002-09-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classical Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone as told in Homer's Hymn to Demeter has been used most often to explain the cycle of the seasons. However, a closer examination will reveal insights on living and dying, loss and reconciliation, and suffering and healing. This work demostrates the continued importance and relevance of the myth of Demeter and Persephone to today's society. The first three chapters provide a summary of the Homeric story and examine the myth from the perspectives of the mother and daughter. The following chapters discuss the symbolism of critical objects, the role of female mentoring, the role of Hades and the meaning of the underworld, the subject of rape, and the masculinist perspective presented by Zeus and Helios, and derive lessons useful for healing and knowledge. The Hymn to Demeter as translated by Helene Foley is included as an appendix in order to provide a basis for the discussion in the text. Notes and a bibliography also follow the text.
Download or read book The Persephone Myth in Young Adult Fiction written by Cristina Salcedo González and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-12-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating the widespread but understudied presence of the Persephone myth within 21st-century young adult literature, Cristina Salcedo González analyses six young adult novels which incorporate a reworking of this ancient Greek myth. Through the identification of mythic themes ('mythemes') and patterns within these novels, González shows that these works evoke the female life cycle and develop current perceptions of the female maturational experience. As a result, González makes an important contribution in establishing the cultural significance of young adult literature in the world of classical reception. These novels, all written by women, also inflect or interpret the myth in ways influenced by their contemporary contexts, specifically the impact of the novels' target readership on the aspects of the myth that are either emphasised (e.g. Persephone's descent into the underworld; her existence there; and her re-ascent) or de-emphasised (e.g. the mourning and wanderings of Demeter). This book makes original methodological contributions – through its innovative dual perspective of myth criticism and classical reception – to our understanding of the academically neglected genre of young adult literature and the reception of the myth of Persephone. As a result, González makes an important contribution in establishing the cultural significance of young adult literature in the world of classical reception.
Download or read book Life s Daughter death s Bride written by Kathie Carlson and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1997 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth exploration of the profound relevance for contemporary women of the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Richly illustrated with dreams, insights, and relational dynamics drawn from clients in psychotherapy, this book will appeal to both layperson and professional. 25 photos.
Download or read book Images of Persephone written by Elizabeth T. Hayes and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Demeter and Persephone written by Joanna Korba and published by Benchmark Education Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perform this ancient Greek myth about Persephone and her mother.
