Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf / Edition 1

by Martha Carpentier

Overview

First Published in 1998. Volume 12 in the Library of Anthropology series. This text traces the influence of Jane Ellen Harrison, a brilliant classicist and one of the 'Cambridge Anthropologists' on Jams Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Decade of critical over-emphasis on Sir James Frazer's influence on modernism have obscured the more important contributions of Harrison, who explored the chthonic Greek matriarchal cults prior to patriarchal Olympianism and originated the 'ritual theory', finding the origins of Greek drama- and ultimately of all art, in religious ritual. Harrison's images of matriarchal divinity and the feminist principles they embodied inspired these modernist writers to envision the young artist reborn as creator through symbolic union with the semiotic body.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789057005176
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/21/1998
Series:	Library of Anthropology Series , #12
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Martha Carpentier is currently an associate professor in the English Department at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, USA.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 The “Anthropological Method” of Myth Interpretation: E.B. Tylor and Andrew Lang; Chapter 3 Myth and Magic: Frazer, Harrison, and the “Ritual Theory”; Chapter 4 Eleusis at Ithaca: Mother, Maid, and Witch in Joyce’S Ulysses; Chapter 5 Sweeney and the Matricidal Dance: the Evolution of T. S. Eliot’s Drama; Chapter 6 Orestes in the Drawing-Room: Mother, Maid, and Witch in T.S. Eliot’s the Family Reunion; Chapter 7 Themis in to the Lighthouse·. Jane Harrison and Virginia Woolf;

Editorial Reviews

"This is a creative work for linking literature, religion, and anthropology...the book would make for a valuable classroom text to explore such linkages in an introductory fashion."

From the Publisher

This is a creative work for linking literature, religion, and anthropology...the book would make for a valuable classroom text to explore such linkages in an introductory fashion.

Frank J. Korom