Ancient Greek culture is pervaded by a profound ambivalence regarding female beauty. It is an awe-inspiring, supremely desirable gift from the gods, essential to the perpetuation of a man's name through reproduction; yet it also grants women terrifying power over men, posing a threat inseparable from its allure. The myth of Helen is the central site in which the ancient Greeks expressed and reworked their culture's anxieties about erotic desire. Despite the passage of three millennia, contemporary culture remains almost obsessively preoccupied with all the power and danger of female beauty and sexuality that Helen still represents. Yet Helen, the embodiment of these concerns for our purported cultural ancestors, has been little studied from this perspective. Such issues are also central to contemporary feminist thought. Helen of Troy engages with the ancient origins of the persistent anxiety about female beauty, focusing on this key figure from ancient Greek culture in a way that both extends our understanding of that culture and provides a useful perspective for reconsidering aspects of our own. Moving from Homer and Hesiod to Sappho, Aeschylus, and Euripides, Ruby Blondell offers a fresh examination of the paradoxes and ambiguities that Helen embodies. In addition to literary sources, Blondell considers the archaeological record, which contains evidence of Helen's role as a cult figure, worshipped by maidens and newlyweds. The result is a compelling new interpretation of this alluring figure.
Acclaimed author Margaret George tells the story of the legendary Greek woman whose face "launched a thousand ships" in this New York Times bestseller.
father Tyndareus, by stealing Helen he abused something far more important than a woman. Herodotus is keen to emphasise that his research is cuttingedge and Dio Chrysostom overtly sells an anti-Homer line, endeavouring to prove that the ...
Andrew Lang was a prolific Scots man of letters. He was a poet, novelist, and literary critic, and contributor to anthropology. He now is best known as the collector of...
protective, ancestral daimones of local cults. Why should we assume that the heroes were heroized from humans to demigods and daimones, but that Helen was heroized in reverse, from goddess to virtual goddess to human?
Married at a tender age to the Spartan king Menelaus, the beautiful Helen bears him a daughter and anticipates a passionless marriage before falling in love with the Trojan prince Paris, with whom she flees to Troy with devastating ...
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.
As despised as she was desired, Helen of Troy is one of history's most notorious women. In this groundbreaking and richly dramatic novel, the familiar story of passion and violence is told from a new perspective: that of Helen herself.
"Introduces the concept of point of view through Helen of Troy's retelling of the classic Greek myth 'The Wooden Horse'"--
In Greek mythology, Helen, better known as Helen of Sparta or Helen of Troy, was daughter of Zeus and Leda, wife of king Menelaus of Sparta and sister of Castor, Polydeuces and Clytemnestra.
This literary novel explores the passions and motivations of the protagonists and the events of the Trojan War without the machinations of imaginary gods driving their behaviors and actions.