Pastoral Geography and Utopistic Considerations in Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée

Moreana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (Number 195- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Melinda A. Cro
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Foundation Myth ◽  
Pastoral Mode ◽  
Pastoral Setting ◽  
Pastoral Literature

That setting is important to most novels is self-evident, yet this is particularly true of pastoral literature. Pastoral, a popular mode of writing that underwent renewal in the Renaissance, relies on the setting of Arcadia. An idyllic golden age where shepherds contemplate love, Arcadia is intrinsic to the pastoral’s identity. However, the pastoral landscape is renewed and reconsidered in Honoré d’Urfé’s monumental Astrée (1607–27). The author relocates the pastoral setting from ancient Greece to fifth-century France and the region of Forez. Because this was a popular mode at the time, the change of setting drew the reader’s attention to the authorial choice. In the novel, the author distinguishes his work from tradition by relying upon geographic specificity and the motif of the voyage to establish a foundation myth for France. Moreover, the importance of setting raises questions of the nature of the landscape and considerations of the utopistic ramifications for the pastoral mode as d’Urfé conceives it.

Infant-Mother Relations in Ancient Greece

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-420
Author(s):  
HEBMANN VOLLMER
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Know How ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mother Child Relationship

The Fifth Century in Greece, specifically the Pericleic Period in Athens, is regarded as the Golden Age in the history of Western culture. Pericles, a magnanimous statesman with a passion for beauty and sublimity, inspired ingenious forces in others and attracted great men to Athens. Architecture, drama, philosophy, science and medicine flourished and the spirit of Athens profoundly influenced the world. One would like to know how children fared in so great an epoch: their importance within the society; the principles of education; or the concept of an ideal mother-child relationship which we regard as so basic for human development.

The Diabolical Adventures of Don Quixote, or Self-Exorcism and the Rise of the Novel

2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hllaire Kallendorf
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Autonomous Action

This study explores Cervantes’ appropriations of the terminology and imagery of Catholic exorcists and demonologists in the Spanish Golden Age. The “lucid intervals” of Don Quixote, his constant sense that someone pursues him, and his explicit voicing of the words of the exorcism ritual can only be understood fully in relation to contemporaneous religious belief. This essay also argues that the devilishly-described Don Quixote exorcized himself. This action anticipated self-exorcism as preached by the Franciscan Diego Gómez Lodosa. In Cervantes studies, Don Quixote's selfexorcism will become paradigmatic of the autonomous action of this first novelistic character.

Milton's Ideal Day: Its Development as a Pastoral Theme

PMLA ◽  
1942 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Ruth Watson
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Pastoral Tradition ◽  
Pastoral Literature ◽  
The Ideal

Two of the dominant motives in pastoral literature are the “come-live-with-me” theme, which offers to the loved one as inducements gifts generally of a pastoral nature, and the ideal of the “golden age,” which is based upon a personal desire for a patterned idyllic life. The former has been carefully traced by R. S. Forsythe, but the latter has lain neglected in spite of the fact that two of the best known lyrics in the language, Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, utilize this theme. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that the description of the ideal day is a significant and deeply rooted theme which developed gradually during the whole course of the pastoral tradition. Milton's two days derive from this evolution rather than from a few scattered lyrics which immediately preceded his work, as is generally stated.

Confronting the Ancient Greek Golden Age in Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962)

2018 ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Emma Scioli
Keyword(s):  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
The World

In the second of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy, Scioli traces how Jules Dassin repeatedly draws attention to the origins of his 1962 melodrama Phaedra in Greek myth and tragedy through visual imagery, as a complement to his 1960 comedy Never on Sunday. Phaedra’s use of ancient Athenian art, and its suggestive modernization of elements from the ancient Athenian tragedyHippolytusand Racine’s 1677 adaptation Phèdre, force a confrontation with a particular modern formulation of the ancient Greek past. Dassin draws upon the golden age to characterize the world of ancient Greece that irrupts into the early 1960s setting of the film both visually and thematically. Rather than fostering nostalgia for a golden age that might prompt a desire for its return, Phaedra presents it as an intrusive presence from which its characters feel alienated, only to demonstrate that they are inextricably bound, in their modern dress, to repeat what the tragic past has prescribed for them. Such self-conscious appropriation of Athens’ literary-dramatic and artistic-material remains informs the tragic belatedness of Phaedra and reflects upon the American expatriate director’s sense of foreignness in the homeland of his lover and artistic muse, Greek actress and activist Melina Mercouri.

A Leonidas for the Golden Age of Superhero Films: The Thermopylae Tradition in 300 (2006)

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Eric Ross
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Western Historiography

In the second of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Ross proposes the current golden age of superhero movies as an effective lens for viewing the modern idealization of the Spartan king Leonidas as portrayed in 300 (2006). He cites several criteria: the superhero’s origin story; the threats posed by a tyrannical enemy and by civic bureaucracy; and the superhero’s tragic alienation from loved ones and society he protects. Leonidas’ superhero status resonates with Herodotus’ fifth-century BCE account of the Battle of Thermopylae, a “golden” moment in Western historiography, when Leonidas led his 300 Spartan warriors into Homeric “doomed combat” by standing their ground against the massive invasion of the Greek mainland by the army of Xerxes, Great King of Persia. Herodotus’ account has long been recognized as assimilating the Spartan warriors, especially Leonidas, to Homer’s depiction of mythical heroes, who were themselves the bases for twentieth-century superheroes. Ross demonstrates the political ramifications of the film’s use of storytelling to mobilize nostalgia for this golden age into contemporary re-enactment – despite director Zack Snyder’s (in)famous denials of political engagement.

Mary Shelley and the Conception of the Monstrous Vegan

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-60
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Visual Recognition ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Literary Authorship

Chapter 1 argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) marks the origins of the ‘monstrous vegan’ trope. The chapter establishes the vegetarian contexts influencing Shelley’s novel before outlining the principal defining traits of the monstrous vegan. First, the monster’s refusal to eat meat is evidenced and explored in relation to Romantic vegetarianism. Second, his hybrid physiognomy, composed of remnants from the slaughterhouse and charnel house, allows for close attention to acts of visual recognition throughout the novel. Third, the creature’s birth outside of the confines of heterosexual reproduction is explored in relation to his challenge to reproductive futurities, with vegetarianism seen to offer a circular return to a Golden Age of humankind. Finally, the creature’s relation to literary authorship establishes that monstrous vegans bring to the fore the difficulty of inscribing ethical identities onto bodies.

Representations of Children in Ancient Greece

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olympia Bobou
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Vase Painting ◽  
Funerary Reliefs ◽  
The Relationship

Children’s representations appear early in the Greek visual material culture: first they appear in the large funerary vases of the geometric period, while in the archaic period they appear in funerary reliefs and vases. To the representations in vase painting, those in terracotta statuettes can be added in the fifth century, but it is in the fourth century bc that children become a noteworthy subject of representation, appearing both in small- and large-scale objects in different media. This chapter considers the relationship between changing imagery of children in ancient Greece and social and religious developments from the geometric period, through the Hellenistic period and into the Roman period in Greece.

The Black Medeas of Weimar and Nazi Berlin: Jahnn-Straub and Straub-Grillparzer

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-166
Author(s):  
Glen W. Gadberry
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Dramatic Character ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Race Ethnicity

While earlier dramatists treated Medea as a dramatic character, it was Euripides who gave her enduring theatrical prominence. Beyond crafting a timely attack upon a treacherous Corinth to appeal to Athens at the start of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides developed Medea to question the social role of women within a proudly patriarchal society. And he may have been the first to make Medea a non-Greek, a Colchian, a “barbarian”—a term that had become more derisive in the fifth century. In the Golden Age, a female foreigner was marginalized by gender and by heritage/race/ethnicity; a justified or sympathetic Medea challenged Athenian prejudices about both. Yet this Medea is problematic: a seriously aggrieved wife is driven to horrible acts against Greeks—Jason, his sons, the king of Corinth, and as a complicating fillip of multi-gender vengeance, the female rival. Our sympathies are subverted: a wronged Medea could also be a bloody figure of feminine and alien power, fatal to men and women, public and domestic order.

Dialogue as “Lyrical Hermaphroditism”: Mandel shtam's Challenge to Bakhtin

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Boym
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Osip Mandel'shtam ◽  
Different Dimensions

Osip Mandel'shtam, “Fransua Villon”Mikhail Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane”The two epigraphs disclose a crucial “genre gap” between Osip Mandel'shtam and Mikhail Bakhtin. If for Mandel'shtam dialogue is essential to lyric, for Bakhtin the dialogical discourse identifies the novel as a genre in opposition to monologic, self-centered and self-sufficient poetic language. In his essays “Fransua Villon” and “O sobesednike,” Mandel'shtam discusses different dimensions of dialogue—the dialogue between various historical epochs—modernity and Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Renaissance, the dialogue between the author and the distant reader, and finally, the dialogue between the poet's diverse selves. The latter is called “lyrical hermaphroditism” and described in its multiple incarnations, including “ogorchennyi i uteshitel', mat’ i ditia, sudiia i podsudimyi, sobstvennik i nishchii.“ Mandel'shtam's “lyrical hermaphroditism” does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities.

Phallology, phlyakes, iconography and Aristophanes

1987 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 92-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Taplin
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Stage Model ◽  
Actual Performance ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
The One

Two highly unusual vase paintings, which may be more or less direct representations of Aristophanes, have been first published recently. They have received little attention to date, and yet both bring with them intriguing problems, which are not, in my opinion, resolved in the original publications. This double accession is all the more remarkable since up till now there has been so little that might be claimed to illustrate pictorially the golden age of Old Comedy (say 435 to 390 B.C), however loosely or tightly the debatable term ‘illustration’ is used (see note 24). The best known has probably been the attic oenochoe with a squat, near-naked figure prancing on a low stage before an audience of two. He is usually taken to be burlesquing Perseus; but presumably his stage model, if indeed the genre is comedy at all, did not really perform naked and without mask. Closer to representation of actual performance may be the four unglazed oenochoai with polychrome decoration from towards the end of the fifth century, found in the Athenian Agora in 1954. For example the two porters, who are alleged to be carrying a large Dionysiac loaf, and who may be slaves or members of a chorus, have masks which are fairly grotesque, but their bodies are not particularly so (unless the one on the left is supposed to have a long but sketchy phallus pointing diagonally down?).

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