1st Edition
Persephone Rises, 1860–1927 Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality
By Margot K. Louis
Copyright 2009
192 Pages
by
Routledge
192 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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... Read more
Contents: Foreword; Preface; Introduction: gods and mysteries: the revival of paganism and the remaking of mythography through the 19th century; A myth appropriated: Greek Persephone to romantic Proserpine; Marriage by capture and the captive wife in Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell; Proserpine and pessimism: goddesses of death, life, and language from Swinburne to Wharton; The virgin with the sheaf: fertility, ritual, and imagination in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and My Antonia; 'I am Koré': the modernist underworld and the rising Persephone; Appendices; Index.
Biography
Margot K. Louis, who died in August 2007, was Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She was the author of Swinburne and His Gods (1990) and numerous articles on Victorian poetry and mythography.
’Louis adroitly reads treatments of Persephone in poetry, novels, classical studies, and the history of religion. She shows the figure of the abducted goddess in Greek mystery cult and myth to be both index of and catalyst for changing views of gender, culture, religion, marriage, and sexuality in American and European societies during the time period studied. The book thus makes an important contribution to various contemporary disciplines and merits a wide audience... Highly recommended. All readers.’ Choice ’Persephone Rises, completed just days before Louis's death, looks at the uses made of the story, and stands as a fitting testament to her scholarship. The study contains a valuable analysis of classical sources, and charts the myth's subsequent passage through Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton to the Romantics, but Louis's core interest is the twilight world of Victorian spirituality.’ Times Literary Supplement '... this jargon-free study is worthwhile reading and meditating.' Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 'Broad in scope yet succinct in exposition, Persephone Rises explores with the rigor of a classicist and the sensitivity of a humanist the many dimensions of its eponymous Greek mythical figure in Victorian and early Modernist literature, situating these manifestations within antique as well as Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic literary history... Louis succeeds in the difficult task of situating what is essentially an ahistorical narrative body within the historical spaces that contemporary criticism increasingly occupies.' International Journal of the Classical Tradition
