The lost girls : Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination, 1850-1930
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Bibliographic Information
The lost girls : Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination, 1850-1930
（Textxet : studies in comparative literature, 53）
Rodopi, 2007
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TEXTXET 53
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [334]-349) and index
Description and Table of Contents
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.
Table of Contents
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
by "Nielsen BookData"
