Myths of the Odyssey in the British Museum (and beyond): Jane Ellen Harrison’s museum talks and their audience

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-137
Author(s):  
Abigail Baker
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Visitor Experience ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek Vases

Abstract Jane Ellen Harrison’s early work giving tours and lectures in London’s museums offers an unusual window on visitor experience in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the composition and motivations of her audience, looking at how Harrison’s lectures addressed gendered and class-based anxieties about their access to education and ability to respond appropriately to prestigious objects. Harrison used Greek vases to tell stories from ancient Greek literature. She made the case for the value of Greek vases as a repository of stories that could be understood through comparisons with literature but which also stood as evidence in their own right, hinting at lost stories and the perspectives of ordinary people. Her museum talks demonstrate a belief that Greek vases offered an alternative to Classical literature, one which had been made by ordinary people in the past and could be ‘read’ by ordinary people in the present.

Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. March
Keyword(s):  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Full Responsibility ◽  
Ancient Greek Literature

Oedipus Tyrannus by the great tragedian Sophocles is one of the most famous works of ancient Greek literature. The play has always been admired for the unity of its plot; every bit of every scene counts towards the dramatic effect. The action is concentrated into a single day in Oedipus’ life; his heinous crimes of unwittingly committing patricide and incest by marrying his mother all lie long ago in the past, and now, in the action of this one day, there awaits for him only the discovery of the truth. Oedipus is portrayed as a noble king, deeply devoted to his people and they to him. Proud of his earlier defeat of the Sphinx, he is determined to save his city once again, and he unflinchingly pursues the truth of who he is and what he has done, unaware that it will bring him to disaster. The spectators, familiar with Oedipus’ story, wait in horrified suspense for that terrible moment of realisation to arrive. And when it does, Oedipus survives it: he takes full responsibility for what he has done, accepts the grief and the pain, and carries on, remaining indomitable to the end. Sophocles gives no answer as to why Oedipus is made to suffer his tragic fate. Jenny March’s new facing-page translation brings alive the power and complexities of Sophocles’ writing, with a substantial introduction and a detailed commentary which is keyed to important words in the translation and aims to be accessible to readers with little or no Greek.

scholarly journals “To the glory that was Greece": Hellenic patterns in Poe's poetry

2015 ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Dimitrios Tsokanos
Keyword(s):  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Wide Range

Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry has repeatedly drawn the attention of many literary critics since his poems have meticulously been delved into from different perspectives. Undeniably, a multitude of references that allude to ancient Greek mythology and classical literature are present within his verses. These have been noticed and delineated by noteworthy Poe scholars such as Scott Peeples, Kenneth Silverman, Daniel Hoffman and Kevin Hayes in several of their researches in the past. However, despite the wide range of studies that have been published, one cannot encounter any mention regarding the existence of Hellenic motifs or even a reference to an apparent Hellenism in Poe’s poetry. In an effort to outline what has already been affirmed with respect to this topic and to unearth additional links between Poe’s works and Greece, the present essay aims to determine the presence of Hellenic motifs in Poe’s “To Helen” and “Lenore”.

The Southern Slope of Monsalvat: How Spanish Wagnerism Became Catalan

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Clinton D. Young
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Slope ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Symphonic Culture ◽  
Similar Dynamic ◽  
The Way

This article examines the development of Wagnerism in late-nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how it became an integral part of Catalan nationalism. The reception of Wagner's music and ideas in Spain was determined by the country's uneven economic development and the weakness of its musical and political institutions—the same weaknesses that were responsible for the rise of Catalan nationalism. Lack of a symphonic culture in Spain meant that audiences were not prepared to comprehend Wagner's complexity, but that same complexity made Wagner's ideas acceptable to Spanish reformers who saw in the composer an exemplar of the European ideas needed to fix Spanish problems. Thus, when Wagner's operas were first staged in Spain, the Teatro Real de Madrid stressed Wagner's continuity with operas of the past; however, critics and audiences engaged with the works as difficult forms of modern music. The rejection of Wagner in the Spanish capital cleared the way for his ideas to be adopted in Catalonia. A similar dynamic occurred as Spanish composers tried to meld Wagner into their attempts to build a nationalist school of opera composition. The failure of Tomás Bréton's Los amantes de Teruel and Garín cleared the way for Felip Pedrell's more successful theoretical fusion of Wagnerism and nationalism. While Pedrell's opera Els Pirineus was a failure, his explanation of how Wagner's ideals and nationalism could be fused in the treatise Por nuestra música cemented the link between Catalan culture and Wagnerism.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.

How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gideon Nisbet
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon

As a student at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde was often seen with his copies of an acclaimed (and locally infamous) new popular survey of Greek literature, John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (in two series, 1873/6). Those copies survive, and are extensively annotated. Although they must be read with caution, these annotations show Wilde to have been a widely read and increasingly confident young classicist, and hint at his nascent ambition as a translator. Together with relevant manuscript material, the annotations take on more than merely academic significance: they show how the young Wilde, at Symonds’s prompting, was turning ancient Greek cultural insights into present-day possibilities. His intense formative engagement with Studies was to prove fundamental to the mature Wilde’s self-fashioning as a novelist, playwright, and cultural phenomenon.

scholarly journals Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek World

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

scholarly journals Sphingolipid lysosomal storage diseases: from bench to bedside

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muna Abed Rabbo ◽  
Yara Khodour ◽  
Laurie S. Kaguni ◽  
Johnny Stiban
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
Lysosomal Storage Diseases ◽  
Therapeutic Strategies ◽  
Clinical Applications ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lysosomal Storage ◽  
Storage Diseases ◽  
The Past ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
General Aspects

AbstractJohann Ludwig Wilhelm Thudicum described sphingolipids (SLs) in the late nineteenth century, but it was only in the past fifty years that SL research surged in importance and applicability. Currently, sphingolipids and their metabolism are hotly debated topics in various biochemical fields. Similar to other macromolecular reactions, SL metabolism has important implications in health and disease in most cells. A plethora of SL-related genetic ailments has been described. Defects in SL catabolism can cause the accumulation of SLs, leading to many types of lysosomal storage diseases (LSDs) collectively called sphingolipidoses. These diseases mainly impact the neuronal and immune systems, but other systems can be affected as well. This review aims to present a comprehensive, up-to-date picture of the rapidly growing field of sphingolipid LSDs, their etiology, pathology, and potential therapeutic strategies. We first describe LSDs biochemically and briefly discuss their catabolism, followed by general aspects of the major diseases such as Gaucher, Krabbe, Fabry, and Farber among others. We conclude with an overview of the available and potential future therapies for many of the diseases. We strive to present the most important and recent findings from basic research and clinical applications, and to provide a valuable source for understanding these disorders.

At the Still Point of the Turning World: Freud's Reception of Winckelmann's Greece

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Sharon Kool
Keyword(s):  
Vital Role ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Cultural Ideal ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
With Memory ◽  
Of Greece

Freud's theory is primarily concerned with memory, about the present contained within the past. It is also rooted to the past in another way; Freud's reception of the Greek classical tradition played a vital role in the genesis of his oeuvre. Winckelmann's revival of ‘Greece’ dominated German culture up to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, yet besides the importance of Bildung in shaping Freud's early Gymnasium experience, his influence upon Freud is often neglected. While Freud's debt to German Hellenism is clearly demonstrated in his library of classical literature and his collection of Greco-Roman antiquities, the afterlife of Winckelmann's legacy is more subtly inscribed upon psychoanalysis. This paper focuses on Winckelmann's aesthetic reconstruction of classical Greece which made beauty, self-restraint and repression a cultural ideal to be imitated and admired. It is argued that hysteria provided one of the most powerful challenges to this ideal. Psychoanalysis can thus be seen as developing out of a milieu that was still overshadowed by Winckelmann's idealization of Greece. Further, it is argued that Winckelmann advanced a homoerotic tradition in German culture and the sedimentation of this tradition can be discerned in Freud's response to hysteria, his privileging of the masculine and his theory of bisexuality.

Some Bits of Horns from Folkestone

The Geologist ◽  
1861 ◽  
Vol 4 (11) ◽  
pp. 465-467
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
Basal Part ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commercial Value ◽  
Future Thought

Old bones, that would be worthless to anybody else, become valuable to the geologist. There may be nothing picturesque or strikingly singular in their appearance. They may be too rotten or too fragile for the manufacturer; too sapless for the agriculturist; nay, too few or too far between to be of any commercial value at all. And yet bits of bones may be inscriptions of much value to the palæontologist. As every letter in the few lines incised on the famous Rosetta stone was a key to some passage in a forgotten language of the past, so every new bit of bone may be the key to some passage in that greater history of a greater past which geology unrolls. Many years ago—how time flies past—I met with a little patch of mammaliferous drift at Folkestone; I gathered every fragment of bone, every tooth, every shell, which the workmen's picks and spades exhumed, and most of what I could not determine myself at that time, Professor Owen, and my then living and active friend, Mr. Turner, looked over and named.Amongst the bones I then collected were two of form to me before unknown, and which I often since brought back to mind. Two—both fragments of horns—flat at the basal part, perfectly round towards the tip; no goat, nor antelope, nor deer, that I knew, had horns like them; and so those fragments were laid aside (not carelessly) for future thought and comparison. Shortly since in walking through the gallery of the British Museum, I visited the cases containing deers' remains, and there, at once I saw, not the counterparts, but what seemed to me the fac-similes of my bits of horns.

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