The lost girls: Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination 1850-1930

Radford, A.D. (2007) The lost girls: Demeter-Persephone and the literary imagination 1850-1930. Rodopi. ISBN 9789042022355

Abstract

The lost girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers Mary Webb and Mary Butts who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts's case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced and became transformed by the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades, The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.

• Item Type: Edited Books
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: UNSPECIFIED
• Authors: Radford, A.D.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism; P Language and Literature > PA Classical philology
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Publisher: Rodopi
• ISBN: 9789042022355

Related URLs

• University of Glasgow Library Catalogue