Helen of Troy

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

List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Source Acknowledgments xv Conventions xvii Introduction: Ab ovo 1 Beginnings 1 Stories and Contexts 2 Chapter 1: Narrating Myth 10 Whose Story? 10 Absence 12 Fragments and Narrative 15 Closure 17 The Textual Shudder 20 Myth and Repetition 23 Origins 26 Myth and Meaning 28 Causes 30 (En)Closure 33 Chapter 2: Beauty 35 Excess and Deficiency 35 Narrating the Absolute 39 Staging the Absolute 43 Detailing Helen 45 The Beauty Effect 49 Helen’s Breasts 52 Androgyny 56 Helen’s Scar 59 Relativizing the Absolute 65 Helen and Old Age 69 Beauty: Subjectivity and Objectivity 74 Beauty and Nostalgia 78 Chapter 3: Abducting Helen 83 Missing Moments 83 Homer, the Iliad 84 Herodotus, the Histories 86 Chaucer and Narrative Gaps 88 Helen and Cressida 93 The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632) 97 Statute Change in 1597 100 The Rape of Lucrece (1594) 102 Helen (of Troy) 104 Rape as Revenge 107 Chapter 4: Blame 109 Accounts 109 Casting Blame: Helen, Paris, and the Gods 110 Sidestepping Blame: Sympathy in the Iliad 113 Competing Narratives: the Odyssey 115 “Twisting Eulogy / And Censure Both Together” 116 Voicing Helen: Euripides 118 Helen Among the Sophists 120 Agency (1): Joseph of Exeter 124 Agency (2): Middle English Troy Books 126 George Peele, The Tale of Troy (1589) 129 Deifying Helen: John Ogle, The Lamentation of Troy (1594) 131 Mimetic Desire, the Scapegoat, and Blasphemy 134 Naming and Shaming 138 Chapter 5: Helen and the Faust Tradition 142 Form and Appearance in the English Faust Book 144 Helen in the English Faust Book 147 Dr Faustus and Language 150 Dr Faustus and Boundaries 153 Goethe (1749–1832) 154 Goethe and Representation 155 Goethe and the Beauty of Language 158 The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships 160 Jo Clifford (1950–) 164 Clifford’s Helen and Gender Politics 168 Chapter 6: Parodying Helen 173 Comedy 174 The Novel 185 Caribbean Helen: Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990) 198 Notes 207 References 231 Index 250