Helen of Troy From Homer to Hollywood

by Maguire, Laurie

• ISBN13: 9781444308624
• ISBN10: 1444308629
• Edition: 1st
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2009-04-17
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood is a comprehensive literary biography of Helen of Troy, which explores the ways in which her story has been told and retold in almost every century from the ancient world to the modern day.

• Takes readers on an epic voyage into the literary representations of a woman who has wielded a great influence on Western cultural consciousness for more than three millennia
• Features a wide and diverse variety of literary sources, including epic, drama, novels, poems, film, comedy, and opera, and works by Homer, Euripides, Chaucer, Shakespeare
• Includes an analysis of a radio play by the prize-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and a Faust play by a contemporary Scottish playwright
• Explores themes such as narrative difficulties in portraying Helen, how legal history relates to her story, and how writers apportion blame or exculpate her
• Considers the aesthetic and narrative difficulties that ensue when literature translates myth

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

Preface

Source Acknowledgments

Conventions

Introduction: Ab ovo

Beginnings

Stories and Contexts

1. Narrating Myth

Whose Story?

Absence

Fragments and Narrative

Closure The Textual Shudder

Myth and Repetition

Origins

Myth and Meaning

Causes

(En)Closure

2. Beauty

Excess and Deficiency

Narrating the Absolute

Staging the Absolute

Detailing Helen

The Beauty Effect

Helen’s Breasts

Androgyny

Helen’s Scar

Relativizng the Absolute

Helen and Old Age

Beauty: Subjectivity and Objectivity

Beauty and Nostalgia

3. Abducting Helen

Missing Moments

Homer, the Iliad

Herodotus, the Histories

Chaucer and Narrative Gaps

Helen and Cressida

The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632)

Statute Change in 1597

The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Helen (of Troy)

Rape as Revenge

4. Blame

Accounts

Casting Blame: Helen, Paris, and the Gods

Sidestepping Blame: Sympathy in the Iliad

Competing Narratives: the Odyssey

"Twisting Eulogy/And Censure Both Together"

Voicing Helen: Euripides

Helen Among the Sophists

Agency (1): Joseph of Exeter

Agency (2): Middle English Troy Books

George Peele, The Tale of Troy (1589)

Deifying Helen: John Ogle, The Lamentation of Troy (1594)

Mimetic Desire, the Scapegoat, and Blasphemy

Naming and Shaming

5. Helen and the Faust Tradition

Form and Appearance in the English Faust Book

Helen in the English Faust Book

Dr Faustus and Language

Dr Faustus and Boundaries

Goethe (1749–1832) Goethe and Representation

Goethe and the Beauty of Language

The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

Jo Clifford (1950– )

Clifford’s Helen and Gender Politics

6. Parodying Helen

Comedy

The Novel

Caribbean Helen: Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)

Notes

References

Index