Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera
Cambridge University Press, 10/25/2007
EAN 9780521867337, ISBN10: 0521867339
Hardcover, 326 pages, 25.2 x 17.9 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Human sacrifice has fascinated Western writers since the beginnings of European literature. It is prominent in Greek epic and tragedy, and returned to haunt writers after the discovery of the Aztec mass sacrifices. It has been treated by some of the greatest creative geniuses, including Shakespeare and Wagner, and was a major topic in the works of many Modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence and Stravinsky. In literature, human sacrifice is often used to express a writer's reaction to the residue of barbarism in his own culture. The meaning attached to the theme therefore changes profoundly from one period to another, yet it remains as timely an image of cultural collapse as it did over two thousand years ago. Drawing on sources from literature and music, in this 2007 book Derek Hughes examines the representation of human sacrifice in Western culture from The Iliad to the invasion of Iraq.
1. Human sacrifice, ancient and modern
2. Greece
3. Virgil to Augustine
4. The discovery of America
5. Shakespeare and the economics of sacrifice
6. Britain and America
Dryden, Behn, and Defoe
7. Lieto Fine
Baroque and Enlightenment sacrifice
8. The French Revolution to Napoleon
9. The secularization of sacrifice
10. Gothic sacrifice
11. Wagner
12. The second coming of Dionysius
13. Pentheus 1913
14. Sparagmos
15. Hitler and after
Bibliography.