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Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Paperback)
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Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Paperback)
Series: Myth and Poetics
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Like the male heroes of epic poetry, Helen of Troy has been
immortalized, but not for deeds of strength and honor; she is
remembered as the beautiful woman who disgraced herself and
betrayed her family and state. Norman Austin here surveys
interpretations of Helen in Greek literature from the Homeric
period through later antiquity. He looks most closely at a
revisionist myth according to which Helen never sailed to Troy, but
remained blameless, while a libertine phantom or ghost impersonated
her at Troy. Comparing the functions of contradictory images of
Helen, Austin helps to clarify the problematic relations between
beauty and honor and between ugliness and shame in ancient
Greece.Austin first discusses the canonical account if the Iliad
and the Odyssey: Helen as the archetype of woman without shame. He
next considers different versions of Helen in the Homeric
tradition. Among these, he shows how Sappho presents Helen as an
icon of absolute beauty while she defends her own preference of
eros over honor and her choice of woman as the object of desire.
Austin then turns to three major authors who repudiated the
traditional Helen of Troy: the lyric poet Stesichorus and the
dramatist Euripides, who embraced the alternative myth of Helen's
phantom; and the historian Herodotus, who claimed to have found in
Egypt a Helen story that dispenses with both Helen and the phantom.
Austin maintains that the conflicting motives that prompted these
writers to rehabilitate Helen led to further revisions of her
image, though none have endured as a credible substitute for the
Helen of epic tradition.
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