LITR 105 - Mythology in Literature: Greek, Roman and Norse

From Zeus and Europa, to Diana, Pan and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome seem to exert a timeless power over us. But what do those myths represent, and why are they so enduringly fascinating? Why do they seem to be such a potent way of talking about ourselves, our origins and our desires? This imaginative and stimulating Very Short Introduction goes beyond a simple retelling of the stories to explore the rich history and diverse interpretations of classical myths. It is a wide-ranging account, examining how classical myths are used and understood in both high art and popular culture, taking the reader from the temples of Crete to skyscrapers in New York, and finding classical myths in a variety of unexpected places: from Arabic poetry and Hollywood films, to psychoanalysis, the bible, and New Age spiritualism.

Features essays regarding Greek myth's intersection with history, philosophy and religion.

Tells the stories behind the artwork, exploring how artists of antiquity determined which motifs to use to tell an underlying story. Describes the intellectual, social and artistic contexts in which the images were created.

Mythos is a modern collection of Greek myths, stylishly retold by legendary writer, actor, and comedian Stephen Fry. Fry transforms the adventures of Zeus and the Olympians into emotionally resonant and deeply funny stories, without losing any of their original wonder. This stunning book features classical artwork inspired by the myths, as well as learned notes from the author.

Considers how Ovid found and shaped his narrative from the creation of the world to his own times, illustrating the cruelty of jealous gods, the pathos of human love, and the imaginative fantasy of flight, monsters, magic and illusion.

Plato's penchant for mythmaking sits uneasily beside his reputation as the inventor of rationalist philosophy. Hegel's solution was to ignore the myths. Popper thought them disqualifying. Tae-Yeoun Keum responds by carving out a place for myth in the context of rationalism and shows how Plato's tales inspired history's great political thinkers.

Draws upon the disciplines of history, sociology, feminism, ethnography and psychoanalysis to raise questions about gender, class, sexuality, family structure and ideology in medieval Iceland.

Explores the transmission of Norse myth, the use of literature in society and authorial self-reflection, the place of myth in the expression of family relationships and recurrent motifs in Northern literature.

Covers mythology, family sagas and Eddaic and skaldic verses. Also discusses how a range of authors from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney have been influenced by Old Norse-Icelandic literature.

An innovative and accessible overview of how ancient Scandinavians understood and made use of their mythological stories. Old Norse Mythology provides a unique survey of the mythology of Scandinavia: the gods Þórr (Thor) with his hammer, the wily and duplicitous Óðinn (Odin), the sly Loki, and other fascinating figures. They create the world, battle their enemies, and die at the end of the world, which arises anew with a new generation of gods. These stories were the mythology of the Vikings, but they were not written down until long after the conversion to Christianity, mostly in Iceland. In addition to a broad overview of Nordic myths, the book presents a case study of one myth, which tells of how Þórr (Thor) fished up the World Serpent, analyzing the myth as a sacred text of the Vikings. This superb introduction traces the use of the mythology in ideological contexts, from the Viking Age until the twenty-first century, as well as in entertainment.

Most people have heard of the Celts--the elusive, ancient tribal people who resided in present-day England, Ireland, Scotland and France. Paradoxically characterized as both barbaric and innocent, the Celts appeal to the modern world as a symbol of a bygone era, a world destroyed by the ambition of empire and the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe. Despite the pervasive cultural and literary influence of the Celts, shockingly little is known of their way of life and beliefs, because very few records of their stories exist. In this book, for the first time, Philip Freeman brings together the best stories of Celtic mythology. In these stories a mysterious and invisible realm of gods and spirits exists alongside and sometimes crosses over into our own human world; fierce women warriors battle with kings and heroes, and even the rules of time and space can be suspended. Captured in vivid prose these shadowy figures-gods, goddesses, and heroes-come to life for the modern reader.

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child -- not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power -- the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus. But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love. With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world.

Focuses on three stories: Orpheus; Venus/Adonis; and Pygmalion. Each section begins with the classical source and ends with contemporary versions, showing how each myth has been used/abused or appropriated since its origin.

Although relatively obscure during his lifetime, William Blake has become one of the most popular English artists and writers, through poems such as "The Tyger" and "Jerusalem," and images including The Ancient of Days. Less well-known is Blake's radical religious and political temperament and that his visionary art was created to express a personal mythology that sought to recreate an entirely new approach to philosophy and art. This book examines both Blake's visual and poetic work over his long career, from early engravings and poems to his final illustrations to Dante and the Book of Job. Divine Images further explores Blake's immense popular appeal and influence after his death, offering an inspirational look at a pioneering figure.

A delightful collection of modern Chinese tales The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales brings together forty-two magical Chinese tales, most appearing for the first time in English. These stories have been carefully selected from more than a thousand originally published in the early twentieth century under the pseudonyms Lin Lan and Lady Lin Lan--previously unknown in the West, and now acclaimed as the Brothers Grimm of China. The birth of the tales began in 1924, when one author, Li Xiaofeng, published a set of literary stories under the Lin Lan pen name, an alias that would eventually be shared by an editorial team. Together, this group gathered fairy tales (tonghua) from rural regions across China. Combining traditional oral Chinese narratives with elements from the West, the selections in this collection represent different themes and genres--from folk legends to comic tales. Characters fall for fairies, experience predestined love, and have love/hate relationships with siblings. Garden snails and snakes transform into cooking girls, and dragon daughters construct houses. An introduction offers historical and social context for understanding the role that the Lin Lan stories played in modern China. Appendixes include information on tale types and biographies of the writers and contributors. The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales is a captivating testament to the power of storytelling.

Egyptian myths articulated the core values of one of the longest lasting civilizations in history, and myths of deities such as Isis and Osiris influenced contemporary cultures and became part of the Western cultural heritage. Egyptian Mythology: A Very Short Introduction explains the cultural and historical background to the fascinating and complex world of Egyptian myth, with each chapter dealing with a particular theme. To show the variety of source material for Egyptian myth, each chapter features a particular object--such as the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle, a golden statue of Tutankhamun, and a papyrus containing a story in which the Egyptian gods behave outrageously--which is illustrated by a photograph or line-drawing. The myth "The Contendings of Horus and Seth" is looked at in detail, and the many interpretations it has provoked are examined. In addition to a list of major deities and myths, there are explanations of related topics such as how hieroglyphs work, royal names and titles, and the Egyptian cosmos. There is also a timeline of Egyptian history, a glossary of technical terms and an up-to-date bibliography.

Everywhen is a groundbreaking collection about diverse ways of conceiving, knowing, and narrating time and deep history. Looking beyond the linear documentary past of Western or academic history, this collection asks how knowledge systems of Australia's Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders can broaden our understandings of the past and of historical practice. Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, narrating, and reenacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all history now. Ultimately, questions of time and language are questions of Indigenous sovereignty. Everywhen brings Indigenous knowledges to bear on the study and meaning of the past and of history itself. It seeks to draw attention to every when, arguing that Native time concepts and practices are vital to understanding Native histories and, further, that they may offer a new framework for history as practiced in the Western academy.

A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.

The Germanic Tribes, the Gods and the German Far Right Today deals with the question of how right-wing extremists in German-speaking countries adapt and adopt elements from the history, culture, and mythology of the Germanic tribes. It provides the first in-depth study of the adoption of these historical motifs by right-wing extremists. Using linguistic and historical perspectives, and drawing on both publicly accessible material and sources gathered by the intelligence services, the book delineates the influence and impact of Germanic tribal history and culture within extremist subcultures. The author demonstrates that references to the Germanic peoples, their history, culture, and mythology, are even more widespread among contemporary right-wing extremists than they were in the interwar National Socialist era. This book will be of interest to researchers of right-wing extremism, German politics, and social movements.

Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day.

Proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Myth: A New Symposium offers a broad-based assessment of the present state of myth study. It was inspired by a revisiting of the influential mid-century work Myth: A Symposium (edited by Thomas Sebeok). A systematic introduction and 15 contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines offer a range of views on past myth study and suggest directions for the future. Contributors blend theoretical analysis with richly documented historical, ethnographic, and literary illustrations and examples drawn from Native American, classical, medieval, and modern sources.

A survey of the past 300 years of theorizing on myth, this book takes into account the work of such prominent thinkers as Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, C. G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud. It focuses on different approaches to myth, from all of the major disciplines--including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. Robert Segal considers the future study of myth, and the possible function of myth in the world as the adult equivalent of play. In order to analyze the different theories of myth, Segal focuses on the fable concerning the fate of the preternaturally beautiful Adonis. Where one theory does not work, he substitutes another myth, showing that, for all their claims to all-inclusiveness, certain theories, in fact, only apply to specific kinds of myths. A uniform set of questions is provided to elucidate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the conjectures.

Explores the influence of Ovid on subsequent literature and visual arts.

2022 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s. In this book, David Tavárez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavárez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entangled transatlantic histories and shining new light on texts still connected to contemporary observances in Zapotec communities.

Many biographies of the Buddha have been published in the last 150 years, and all claim to describe the authentic life of the historical Buddha. This book, written by one of the leading scholars of Buddhism and Japanese religion, starts from the opposite assumption and argues that we do not yet possess the archival and archaeological materials required to compose such a biography: All we have are narratives, not facts. Yet traditional biographies have neglected the literary, mythological, and ritual elements in the life of the Buddha. Bernard Faure aims to bridge this gap and shed light on a Buddha that is not historical but has constituted a paradigm of practice and been an object of faith for 2,500 years. The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha opens with a criticism of the prevalent historicism before examining the mythological elements in a life of the Buddha no longer constrained by an artificial biographical framework. Once the search for the "historical Buddha" is abandoned, there is no longer any need to limit the narrative to early Indian stories. The life--or lives--of the Buddha, as an expression of the creative imaginations of Buddhists, developed beyond India over the centuries. Faure accordingly shifts his focus to East Asia and, more particularly, to Japan. Finally, he examines recent developments of the Buddha's life in not only Asia but also the modern West and neglected literary genres such as science fiction.

The Truth of Myth is a thorough and accessible introduction to the study of myth, surveying the intellectual history of the topic, methods for studying myth cross-culturally, and emerging trends. Readers will encounter insightful commentaries on such questions as: What is the relation of mythology to religion? To science? To popular culture? Did the events recounted in myths actually occur? Why does the term "myth" have so many contradictory definitions and connotations? Offering serious students with an intellectual "toolkit" for launching into this fascinating field, the book is especially useful in conjunction with case studies of individual mythological traditions.

Analyzes classical themes as seen in the works of Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Countee Cullen.

Angrboda's story begins where most witch's tales end: with a burning. A punishment from Odin for refusing to give him knowledge of the future, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into a remote forest. There she is found by a man Loki, and her initial distrust grows into a deep and abiding love. Their union produces three unusual children, each with a secret destiny, who she is keen to raise at the hidden from Odin's all-seeing eye. But as Angrboda slowly recovers her prophetic powers, she learns that her blissful life - and possibly all of existence - is in danger.