Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Circe (greek mythology) – fiction"

Circe is renowned for her profound knowledge of sorcery as a minor goddess in Greek mythology. Her depictions and representations are numerous in literature, painting, music, and popular culture, ranging from Homer’s classical masterpiece The Odyssey to John William Waterhouse’s painting Circe Invidiosa (1892). Recently, Circe has been recreated with a modern kick by the contemporary American novelist Madeline Miller. In Miller’s novel Circe (2018), Circe voices her own story as the first-person heroine. The novel focuses on the spiritual growth and self-fulfilment of the protagonist. Reimagined by Miller in her family home in the early chapters, Circe is the innocent yet neglected child, always strange, pushed away, looked down upon, and alienated by her parents, siblings, and relatives. Miller first portrays Circe in her father’s halls where she is made to believe that she is a failure, she is incomplete, lacking, and neither a nymph nor a goddess. However, as her powers as a witch begin to unravel, some of her practices draw the attention of the patriarchs in her life, and she is exiled by these men to an island named “Aiaia.” How a woman can turn a punishment given by men into an advantage is shown in the novel. Marginalised and exiled to a deserted island with a house, forests, herbs, plants, and animals, Miller’s Circe practices her witchcraft, discovers life, and manifests her true self. In this respect, this article focuses on how Circe’s island, which she turns into her “home,” empowers Circe as a woman.

This study investigates the intertextual use of Greek mythology in Agatha Christie’s short stories Philomel Cottage, The Face of Helen, and The Oracle at Delphi, a short story collection The Labours of Hercules, and a novel, Nemesis. The results of this research based on the hermeneutical and comparative methods reveal that A. Christie’s intertextual formula developed over time. In her early works, allusions were based on characters' appearances and functions as well as on the use of motifs and themes from Greek myths. Later on, she turned to using allusory character names; this would mislead her readers who thought they already knew the formula of her stories. Although not a postmodern writer, A. Christie enjoyed playing games of allusion with her readers. She wanted them not only to solve a case but also to discover and interpret the intertextual references.

In contrast to any fiction in the usual sense of the term, the huge narrative domain now marked off as (Greek) ‘mythology’ deserves no charter of semantic independence or of structural(ist) closure. Coupled with the perspective of social and cultural anthropology required by the construction of possible worlds depending on cultural representations and by the poetic forms they assume in collective and ritual performances, our reading of (Greek) myths requires a pragmatic opening-up: it takes into account the specific ritual situations they are accommodated to, with their aesthetic creativity and their poetic polysemy, in a broader social, religious, and cultural context. This can be demonstrated through the example of a fragmentary cultic poem by Sappho introduced by an address to Hera and staging a particular version of the <em>nostos</em> of the Atreidai.

Fantasising plays an unique role in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Theoretically locked into the framework of static religion -its "raison d'être"-it is in fact its secular arm ; but it may overstep its strict function, consisting in creating fantasising images intended to ensure social cohesion and, in so doing, to open out to what well and truly seems to come from pure creative fiction, as is attested by the relation of Greek mythology to Roman religion. The fact that the Christian mystic - the most worthy representative of dynamic religion - needs to have recourse to this in order to be heard, confirms this singularity.