Adaptation of Classical Myth
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 …
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 …
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 …
Scylla was not always the man-eating cliff-dwelling creature that devoured seafarers and their crews. Scylla came to be all that after Circe’s magical potions transformed her into the atavistic horror Odysseus met first-hand. In her earlier existence, Scylla was once a comely young woman whom …
Nicolas Poussin, “Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite”, mid-1630s, oil on canvas (part of ‘Bacchanals’ series for Château de Richelieu?), Philadelphia Museum of Art, accession no. E1932-1-1 The George W. Elkins Collection, 1932. — Amphitrite1.0029_Poussin A super-hi-res of this painting is available at Google Arts & …
Sir Thomas Larence (1769-1830) painted a remarkable portrait of Pope Pius VII (1819)* referencing two mythological sculptural masterpieces from antiquity, the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere. Historical and intertextual reasons for this inclusion are worth considering. Historically: Pius VII (1742-1823) found himself grappling against the …
Bethany C. Morrow (2020), A Song Below Water (Tor Teen) — two adolescent sirens in and off-shore contemporary Portland, Oregon encounter challenges not unfamiliar to the adolescent and YA readers who will read the novel. I CONFESS*: I am not in the demographic readership for whom Bethany …
Paul Manship, 1885-1966 “Time and the Fates” — OGCMAFates1.0106_Manship 1938 monumental plaster sundial now destroyed (bronze copies survive) Minn. Museum of Art; SAAM for New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940 https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/worlds-fair-models/4gFy23s-lw5Bfw Note: GA&C treats the photograph as the artwork. Margaret Bourke-White, 1938, “World’s Fair Models”, …
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Osamu Tezuka, 1927-1989, character of Zephyrus in Swallowing the Earth Tikyuwo Nomu. English translation by Kumar Sivasubramanian, 2009. Gardena, CA, Digital Manga Publishing. — Original serialized in Big Komikku, 1968-1969. Tezuka Osamu manga zenshū, Vol. 259-60. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1982. Zephyrus is part of Tezuka’s “star …