Myths of the Golden Age in European Culture

Auteur

Stephen G. Nichols is the James M. Beall Professor Emeritus and Academy Professor of French and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, an Honorary Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory (which he directed from 1996-2001). He received an honorary Docteur dès Lettres from the University of Geneva, is an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (France) and was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize in 2008, 2015, and 2023. A Yale University Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, he has written or edited some 27 books on the Middle Ages, including Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, which received MLA's Lowell Prize for an outstanding book, and From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age. Nichols co-directs JHU's Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts and co-founded the journal Digital Philology.

Claudia Olk is chair of English and Director of the Shakespeare Library at Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München. Until 2019 she was chair of Comparative Literature at the Peter Szondi Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Humanities. Her main fields of research are Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies as well as Modernism. She is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and served as President of the German Shakespeare Society from 2014-2023. Her publications include: Travel and Narration: the development of fiction in late medieval and renaissance travel narratives (1999), Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics of Vision (2014), and Shakespeare and Beckett: Restless Echoes (2023). Her edition of one of Virginia Woolf's hitherto unpublished manuscripts was published in 2013 by the British Library.

Texte du rabat

This book offers a fresh look at Hesiod's concept of a 'Golden Age'. It analyses the ways in which classical philosophers explored it and traces the many creative interactions with it in literature from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Goethe as well as Chinese literature.

Résumé

Hesiod's concept of a Golden Age, together with analogous myths Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, etc. speak to the psychic appeal, perhaps even deep-rooted need, for humans to conceive alternate worlds free from the anguish, toil, and dangers of the one they inhabit. Classical poets and philosophers explored the myth; the Middle Ages imagined it as the land of Cockaigne; Early Modern dramatists incorporated it; Romantic poets and nineteenth-century writers imagined it in various guises. This volume explores the configuration presented by Hesiod and the history of its reception and transformation in European literature and culture. The chapters study how texts written in specific historical moments of European history reshape elements of the myth to explore contemporary issues of concern. The book addresses these issues of cultural hybridization, and, from a transhistorical perspective, provides new insights into the dynamics of epochal shifts. It also looks at similar configurations in non-Western civilizations (China), which complements the spectrum of contributions that covers periods from classical antiquity to the Age of Goethe.

Contenu

List of Contributors

Preface

Claudia Olk and Stephen G. Nichols,

Introduction

Oliver Primavesi

Chapter 1: Hesiod and Empedocles on the Decline of Humankind

Stephen G. Nichols

Chapter 2: Eros and Eris in Hesiod's Myth of the Golden Age

Jack I. Abecassis

Chapter 3: In defense of the Evil Brother, an Interpretation of Hesiod's Works and Days

Daniel Heller-Roazen

Chapter 4: The Oldest Reading: Prometheus and the Arts of Divination

Brian J. Reilly

Chapter 5: Immeasurably Preferred to Gold: The Saintly Age of Medieval Christian Salvation

Gaia Gubbini

Chapter 6: After the End: The Troubadours, the Golden Age, and a Fading Civilization

Claudia Olk

Chapter 7: 'T'excel the Golden Age': Golden Worlds in the English Renaissance

Joachim Küpper

Chapter 8: Patriarchal Fantasies and Proto-Feminist Libertarianism: Don Quijote's Praise of the Golden Age and Marcela's Plea for Freedom

Andreas Höfele

Chapter 9: The Golden Age Restored, London 1616: Court Entertainment and Stuart Politics

David E. Wellbery

Chapter 10: The Golden Age in the Age of Goethe

Michael Lackner

Chapter 11: One Golden Age? Or many? Chinese Conceptions of the Ideal Society

Index