Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies
Marco Fantuzzi
Abstract
The Iliad is a poem whose events revolve around the “anger” of Achilles, and his personal fierceness and pursuit of glory remain, despite different and more complex nuances, the prevailing features of his characterization. This book proposes to investigate how different literary authors and visual artists at different periods responded to Achilles' “erotic life”, an aspect about which the Iliadwas almost completely silent. Achilles' loves expose a crack in the usually self-assured attitude of the hero, demonstrating the limits of epic heroism and the epic vision of the world. As such, these mo ... More
The Iliad is a poem whose events revolve around the “anger” of Achilles, and his personal fierceness and pursuit of glory remain, despite different and more complex nuances, the prevailing features of his characterization. This book proposes to investigate how different literary authors and visual artists at different periods responded to Achilles' “erotic life”, an aspect about which the Iliadwas almost completely silent. Achilles' loves expose a crack in the usually self-assured attitude of the hero, demonstrating the limits of epic heroism and the epic vision of the world. As such, these moments of erotic “weakness” became perfect manifestos for reuse in other genres, such as tragedy and the various forms of love poetry, in which themes of love and passion were more customary than in heroic epic.
Keywords:
heroism,
of war and of love,
history of sexuality,
cross-dressing and initiation,
depos,
erotic poetry,
Latin elegy,
Homeric scholarship,
iconography,
Achilles,
Briseis,
Deidameia,
Penthesileia,
Patroclus
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199603626 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603626.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Marco Fantuzzi, author
Professor of Greek Literature, University of Macerata, Italy, and Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York
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