The lost girls : Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination, 1850-1930 / Andrew Radford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Radford, Andrew, 1972-

Series:

Text (Rodopi (Firm)) ; 53.

Textxet, 0927-5754 ; 53

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Demeter (Greek deity) in literature.

Persephone (Greek deity) in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (357 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Excavating the Dark Half of Hellas

Divine Mother and Maid in Victorian Poetry

Hardy’s Tess: The Making and Breaking of a Goddess

‘Gone to Earth’: Mary Webb’s Doomed Persephone

E. M. Forster and Demeter’s English Garden

Lawrence’s Underworld

Salvaging the Goddess of Wessex

Afterword

Select Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-282-26541-5

9786612265419

94-012-0466-7

1-4356-1193-4

OCLC:

666983699

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401204668 DOI