Americans and the Experience of Delphi
Paul Lorenz and David Roessel, editors
With a Foreword by Tom Papademetriou
Boston, MA: Somerset Hall Press, 2013 (contact:
info@somersethallpress.com<mailto:info@somersethallpress.com>)
ISBN: 978-1-935244-11-0
$34.95
At the beginning of the twentieth century, philhellenic American writers
and artists were inspired and influenced by their love of Greece and
especially Delphi, known in ancient times as the navel of the universe.
Several of these writers and artists visited or moved to Greece, including
Eva Palmer Sikelianos, who was celebrated for her role in the Delphic
Festivals of 1927 and 1930; George Cram Cook, one of the founders of the
famed Provincetown Players; writer Susan Glaspell; poet H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle); and writer Henry Miller.
The scholarly studies in this volume explore the symbiotic relationship
between Delphi and these American philhellenes, who incorporated Delphic
and ancient Greek ideals into their work, and thus changed the course of
American literature. At the same time, a little piece of America has been
fused into both the ancient site and the modern village of Delphi.
Topics:
. Eva Palmer Sikelianos Before Delphi
. Myth, Mystique, Nietzsche, and the "Cultic Milieu" of the Delphic Festivals
. George Cram Cook's Road to the Temple
. The Value of Home: Susan Glaspell's Fugitive's Return as a Response to
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
. The Influence of George Cram Cook's Delphic Spirit on Eugene O'Neill
. Susan Glaspell's Delphi and the Legacy of Jane Ellen Harrison
. Female Charioteers in Susan Glaspell's Plays: Re-visiting the Spirit of
Delphi and Aristotle's Poetics in Inheritors, The Verge, and The Comic
Artist
. The Noble Peasant: Primitivism, Classicism, and the Epistemological
Pivot in Susan Glaspell's Career
. "For you know that Greece is the chord I thrill to!": The Philhellenic
Friendship of George Cram Cook and John Alden
. A Journey toward Gnosis: The Place of Delphi in H.D.'s Majic Ring
H.D.'s Ion: The Door Swings Both Ways
. The Road from Delphi: Henry Miller and Greece
. The Omphalos and the Pythia in Lawrence Durrell
___________________________
Dia Philippides
Research Professor
Dept. of Classical Studies
Boston College
http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/classics/Faculty/dia_philippides.html
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