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A carregar... Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whorepor Bettany Hughes
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Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. If you're looking to find out about Helen of Troy then this is the book for you. I read Euripides's play first and was struck by Helen's similarities to Jesus - I read it from a post-Christian perspective. This book really helped me to understand how the Greeks would have seen Helen. Hughes is actually quite profound when discussing Helen as an eidelon. My one complaint is that the footnotes are a mixture of references and fascinating asides that should be part of the main text. There are many hundreds of footnotes so the flow of your reading is constantly interupted, often only to be told that it's ibid. Ancient history has never been my thing, but if all ancient history books are like this one, then bring it on! Hughes paints an extraordinary picture of life in ancient Greece, focusing on the most famous name from her times - Helen of Troy. While never forgetting there is no evidence that Helen was an actual person, Hughes describes the life and times of princesses of that era and speculates persuasively on the possibility of Helen as a real person. This book, clearly written for a general audience, but never condescending or over-simplified, draws a continuous line from those ancients through history to our own times and I, for one, came away believing that a Helen of Troy certainly existed and swayed the politics and history of the eastern Mediterranean 3,500 years ago.
Bettany Hughes berättande är inspirerat och levande, med ett direkt och naturligt men samtidigt målande språk (och Margareta Eklöfs översättning utgör inga hinder). Tonen är avslappnad men nyfiken och fylld av "tänk om
" och "föreställ er att
". Hon är den första som lanserar Helena som en framstående bronsålderspersonlighet snarare än som en dunkel myt, och till stor del har hon lyckats.
For close to three thousand years, Helen of Troy has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek king Menelaus and the Trojan prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. But who was she? Helen exists in many guises: a matriarch from the Age of Heroes; the focus of a cult that conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess; the home-wrecker of the Iliad; the bitch-whore of Greek tragedy; the pin-up of Romantic artists. Focusing on a flesh-and-blood aristocrat from the Greek Bronze Age, cultural and social historian Hughes reconstructs the context of her life. Through the eyes of a young Mycenaean princess, Hughes examines the physical, historical, and cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece, North Africa, and Asia Minor.--From publisher description. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)398.352Social sciences Customs, Etiquette, Folklore Folklore Real phenomena as subjects of folklore Humanity and human existence Persons without paranormal powersClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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I really feel like I know so much more than I did at the start of this book (and I am not a novice to the topic either). Whilst you could tell Hughes has an academic background through her writing, I think she does a good job of not writing too drily, nor making what she is saying inaccessible.
If you are looking for a retelling of the story, then look elsewhere, but if you are looking for an in-depth discussion of the various portrayals of Helen throughout history, of the myths surrounding her as well as myriad tidbits of evidence from a wide range of source (archeological to legal) then this book has plenty to keep you going.
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