Helen of Troy From Homer to Hollywood

by Maguire, Laurie

• ISBN13: 9781405126342
• ISBN10: 1405126345
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-27
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Starred Review. While the face of Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, it has inspired equally as many depictions. Maguire (English, Univ. of Oxford; How To Do Things with Shakespeare) is concerned with Helen's "literary afterlife," the different ways she has been portrayed in Western literature, from the eighth century B.C.E. (Homer) to the present (Derek Walcott). She is struck by the paradox that while Helen was the cause of so much action, she is often represented only on the narrative margin. Maguire's approach is thematic rather than chronological, including the ambiguities in Helen's mythical story, her beauty, her abduction, her guilt, her role in the Faust tradition, and her presence in various modern parodies. While largely focusing on a rich array of literary sourcesclassical, medieval, Renaissance, and modernshe also draws on art and film. Combining wit, learning, and insight, Maguire offers delightful reading both for the specialist and for the serious general reader. Highly recommended.T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Author Biography

Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at Oxford University and has authored or edited six previous books, including Studying Shakespeare and the popular Where There's a Will There's a Way. She has lectured widely at literary festivals in the U.S. and U.K.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. viii
Preface	p. ix
Source Acknowledgments	p. xv
Conventions	p. xvii
Introduction: Ab ovo	p. 1
Beginnings	p. 1
Stories and Contexts	p. 2
Narrating Myth	p. 10
Whose Story?	p. 10
Absence	p. 12
Fragments and Narrative	p. 15
Closure	p. 17
The Textual Shudder	p. 20
Myth and Repetition	p. 23
Origins	p. 26
Myth and Meaning	p. 28
Causes	p. 30
(En) Closure	p. 33
Beauty	p. 35
Excess and Deficiency	p. 35
Narrating the Absolute	p. 39
Staging the Absolute	p. 43
Detailing Helen	p. 45
The Beauty Effect	p. 49
Helen's Breasts	p. 52
Androgyny	p. 56
Helen's Scar	p. 59
Relativizing the Absolute	p. 65
Helen and Old Age	p. 69
Beauty: Subjectivity and Objectivity	p. 74
Beauty and Nostalgia	p. 78
Abducting Helen	p. 83
Missing Moments	p. 83
Homer, the Iliad	p. 84
Herodotus, the Histories	p. 86
Chaucer and Narrative Gaps	p. 88
Helen and Cressida	p. 93
The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights (1632)	p. 97
Statute Change in 1597	p. 100
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)	p. 102
Helen (of Troy)	p. 104
Rape as Revenge	p. 107
Blame	p. 109
Accounts	p. 109
Casting Blame: Helen, Paris, and the Gods	p. 110
Sidestepping Blame: Sympathy in the Iliad	p. 113
Competing Narratives: the Odyssey	p. 115
"Twisting Eulogy / And Censure Both Together"	p. 116
Voicing Helen: Euripides	p. 118
Helen Among the Sophists	p. 120
Agency (1): Joseph of Exeter	p. 124
Agency (2): Middle English Troy Books	p. 126
George Peele, The Tale of Troy (1589)	p. 129
Deifying Helen: John Ogle, The Lamentation of Troy (1594)	p. 131
Mimetic Desire, the Scapegoat, and Blasphemy	p. 134
Naming and Shaming	p. 138
Helen and the Faust Tradition	p. 142
Form and Appearance in the English Faust Book	p. 144
Helen in the English Faust Book	p. 147
Dr Faustus and Language	p. 150
Dr Faustus and Boundaries	p. 153
Goethe (1749-1832)	p. 154
Goethe and Representation	p. 155
Goethe and the Beauty of Language	p. 158
The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships	p. 160
Jo Clifford (1950-)	p. 164
Clifford's Helen and Gender Politics	p. 168
Parodying Helen	p. 173
Comedy	p. 174
The Novel	p. 185
Caribbean Helen: Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)	p. 198
Notes	p. 207
References	p. 231
Index	p. 250
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