Literature And the Crime Against Nature: From Homer to Hughes

by Sagar, Keith

• ISBN13: 9781904449478
• ISBN10: 1904449476
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-01
• Publisher: Intl Pub Marketing

Summary

At the outset of the third millennium, one problem towers above all others: how are we (as a species living what we think of as a civilized life) to survive? How, that is, are we to continue to live in an overcrowded world whose finite resources are being rapidly exhausted and whose biological life support systems are close to breakdown? There is a widespread and fast-growing belief that tinkering with economics ('sustainable development') and local conservation measures (always too little and too late) are not enough; that what is needed is a revolution in our consciousness regarding our place in the natural world and our responsibilities towards it. This book attempts to reassert the essential relationship between imagination, nature and human survival. Keith Sagar demonstrates, by close readings of major works by seventeen of the greatest writers, from Homer to Hughes, that literature has a central contribution to make in our efforts to discover what are the laws of nature and human nature, and to live within them.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xi
Rebels against the Gods [The Prometheus myth; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound; Homer: The Odyssey]	1	(14)
Aeschylus: The Oresteia and the Superannuation of the Gods	15	(12)
The Curse of the Sphinx -- the Theban Plays of Sophocles	27	(16)
Nature Strikes Back -- The Bacchae of Euripides	43	(11)
Sir Gawain and the Green Girdle [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]	54	(9)
Shakespeare's Marriage of Heaven and Hell [A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Merry Wives of Windsor]	63	(19)
Shakespeare 2: The Victimization of Venus ['Venus and Adonis'; Love's Labours Lost; Hamlet; Troilus and Cressida; Othello; Measure for Measure; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra]	82	(35)
Shakespeare 3: The Crime Against Caliban [The Winter's Tale; The Tempest]	117	(15)
Swift -- The Gulling of Gulliver [Gulliver's Travels]	132	(11)
Wordsworth -- Nature's Priest or Nature's Prisoner?	143	(23)
Coleridge -- The Curse of the Albatross	166	(17)
Emily Bronte -- The Crime Against Heathcliff [Wuthering Heights]	183	(12)
Hawthorne and the Crime Against Woman [The Scarlet Letter]	195	(19)
Whitman and the Voice of Nature	214	(31)
Hopkins and the Religion of the Diamond Body	245	(26)
Conrad -- The Case of the Missing Elephants [Heart of Darkness]	271	(11)
Lawrence and the Resurrection of Pan	282	(30)
Golding and the Crime of Being Human	312	(18)
Hughes -- From World of Blood to World of Light	330	(39)
Afterword	369	(14)
References	383	(6)
Index	389