Adaptation of Classical Myth
The items featured below reflect recent thinking about the adaptation of classical mythology in the arts. Index numbers throughout this site reference the OGCMA — Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts (OUP 1993).
This post was written for MythMatters in August 2015 and modestly corrected here. Miklós Jancsó adapted the stageplay by L. Gyurkó, Szerelmem, Elektra, into the 1974 film Electra, My Love. The film is very watchable as cinema … for some viewers (to judge by the Amazon.com reviews!). …
Carol Ann Duffy’s (b. 1955) “Eurydice” appears as the twenty-fourth poem in her collection The World’s Wife, sidled between “Salome” and “the Kray Sisters”. Like her sisters in the collection, Duffy’s Eurydice vocalizes a silenced woman from literature and myth. Duffy’s witty feminist …
The British National Gallery’s painting of the month for October 2021 is an old favorite of mine, “Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (or, Peace and War)” (1629-1630). Having spent much of my weekend with my beautiful little granddaughters, contemplating the painting this morning takes me …
The big question, the deep thought behind this post is this: What does it mean when a place like Nashville, TN claims to be “THE Athens of the South”? Granted, I have added the emphatic CAPS. Yet, this was the claim in the age of …
A new PSA from the State of Utah uses a celebrity promo, the Cloud Gatherer himself, to encourage Utahns to try harder to prevent wildfires. — Zeus2.0100_UtahGov The directors of the state’s Fire Sense program know well that road-side fires turn often into large-scale range …
The protagonist of Cold Mountain, Ada, reads to Ruby’s kids and to her own nine-year old daughter the story of Baucis and Philemon, a myth of gained paradise. Without any overt acknowledgement of this myth’s approach within the novel, Frazier uses the myth’s telling as …
