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Dancing with Goddesses
Archetypes, Poetry, and Empowerment
by Annis Pratt
Published by: Indiana University Press
8 b&w photos, 3 illus.
- eBook
- 9780253116376
- Published: July 1994
$15.15
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"Pratt offers here an excellent and thorough study of Medusa, Aphrodite, and Artemis. . . . An excellent study for students of myth, of modern literature, and of criticism (especially psychological, archetypal, and biographical criticism)." —Choice
"Annis Pratt, with absorbing ability, blends oppositional ideas and factions into a brilliant discussion about meaning in literature, myth, and poetics. She creates an insightful structural analysis that references archetypalists, myth critics, feminist theologians, feminist neo-Jungians, and feminist archeologists. But it is her own sub-textual voice running under the words, her insistence that her inquiry be one of passionate intensity rather than one of unyielding codification, that ultimately causes her work to be truly original, truly valuable." —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves
"Provides a mature and useful alternative to hegemonic Freudian and Lacanian approaches to literature and psychology and a significant feminism revision of Jungian thought." —Estella Lauter
Pratt explores how female and male poets in England and North America respond to apatriarchal religious and mythological systems in four archetypes: Medusa, Aphrodite, Artemis, and bears.
Preface: Blackbirds in a Pie
Acknowledgments
Part One
Medusa
1. The Other Side of a Mirror: The Deep Background of the Medusa Archetype
2. Medusa in Twentieth-Century British and U.S. Poetry
3. Medusa in Canada
Part Two
Aphrodite
4. The Deep Background of the Aphrodite Archtype
5. Aphrodite in Medieval through Nineteenth-Century Poetry
6. Aphrodite in Twentieth-Century Poetry by Men
7. Aphrodite in Twentieth-Century Poetry by Women
8. Romancing the Stone: Love Poetry in Canada
Part Three:
Where the Wild Things Are
9. The Artemis Continuum
10. Archetypal Patterns and Native American Poetry
11. Bear!
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cites
Index
ANNIS PRATT taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an archetypal critic who started her career writing about Dylan Thomas's use of Welsh religion and myth and went on to examine the archetypes women novelists have used for the last three centuries in her now-classic Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction.
Pratt offers here an excellent and thorough study of Medusa, Aphrodite, and Artemis. After exploring in detail the myths and archetypes associated with these goddesses (all images of the Great Mother), Pratt discusses their representations in 19th— and 20th—century poetry—by men and by women. Although many of the poems come from the US and Great Britain, particularly illuminating are Pratt's discussions of Canadian poems influenced by landscape and environment in ways that American and British poetry usually is not. Moreover, Pratt distinguishes the angles, approaches, and tones in poems by men and those by women, men more likely to view Medusa, Aphrodite, and Artemis in traditional, partriarchal, fearful, or unpleasant ways, whereas women poets (often, though not always) view the three goddesses as sources of empowerment. On the whole, Pratt rejects Jung's notion of fixed archetypes and allows the many-sided goddesses to find expression in extraordinary images and forms. An excellent study for students of myth, of modern literature, and of criticism (especially psychological, archetypal, and biographical criticism). Substantial bibliography. Upper-division undergraduate and up.January 1995
~S. B. Darrell, University of Southern Indiana