Helen Of Troy - From Homer To Hollywood

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.
Takes readers on an epic voyage into the literary representations of a woman who has wielded a great influence on Western cultural consciousness for more than three millennia
Features a wide and diverse variety of literary sources, including epic, drama, novels, poems, film, comedy, and opera, and works by Homer, Euripides, Chaucer, Shakespeare
Includes an analysis of a radio play by the prize-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and a Faust play by a contemporary Scottish playwright
Explores themes such as narrative difficulties in portraying Helen, how legal history relates to her story, and how writers apportion blame or exculpate her
Considers the aesthetic and narrative difficulties that ensue when literature translates myth

Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at Oxford University and has authored or edited six previous books, including Studying Shakespeare and the popular Where There's a Will There's a Way. She has lectured widely at literary festivals in the U.S. and U.K.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Source Acknowledgments
Conventions
Introduction: Ab ovo
Beginnings
Stories and Contexts
1. Narrating Myth
Whose Story?
Absence
Fragments and Narrative
Closure
The Textual Shudder
Myth and Repetition
Origins
Myth and Meaning
Causes
(En)Closure
2. Beauty
Excess and Deficiency
Narrating the Absolute
Staging the Absolute
Detailing Helen
The Beauty Effect
Helen’s Breasts
Androgyny
Helen’s Scar
Relativizng the Absolute
Helen and Old Age
Beauty: Subjectivity and Objectivity
Beauty and Nostalgia
3. Abducting Helen
Missing Moments
Homer, the Iliad
Herodotus, the Histories
Chaucer and Narrative Gaps
Helen and Cressida
The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632)
Statute Change in 1597
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
Helen (of Troy)
Rape as Revenge
4. Blame
Accounts
Casting Blame: Helen, Paris, and the Gods
Sidestepping Blame: Sympathy in the Iliad
Competing Narratives: the Odyssey
"Twisting Eulogy/And Censure Both Together"
Voicing Helen: Euripides
Helen Among the Sophists
Agency (1): Joseph of Exeter
Agency (2): Middle English Troy Books
George Peele, The Tale of Troy (1589)
Deifying Helen: John Ogle, The Lamentation of Troy (1594)
Mimetic Desire, the Scapegoat, and Blasphemy
Naming and Shaming
5. Helen and the Faust Tradition
Form and Appearance in the English Faust Book
Helen in the English Faust Book
Dr Faustus and Language
Dr Faustus and Boundaries
Goethe (1749–1832)
Goethe and Representation
Goethe and the Beauty of Language
The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships
Jo Clifford (1950– )
Clifford’s Helen and Gender Politics
6. Parodying Helen
Comedy
The Novel
Caribbean Helen: Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)
Notes
References
Index