Dancing with Goddesses

"Pratt offers here an excellent and thorough study of Medusa, Aphrodite, and Artemis.... An excellent study for students of myth, of modern literature, and of criticism (especially psychological, archetypal, and biographical criticism)." -- Choice

"Annis Pratt, with absorbing ability, blends oppositional ideas and factions into a brilliant discussion about meaning in literature, myth, and poetics. She creates an insightful structural analysis that references archetypalists, myth critics, feminist theologians, feminist neo-Jungians, and feminist archeologists. But it is her own sub-textual voice running under the words, her insistence that her inquiry be one of passionate intensity rather than one of unyielding codification, that ultimately causes her work to be truly original, truly valuable." -- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves

"Provides a mature and useful alternative to hegemonic Freudian and Lacanian approaches to literature and psychology and a significant feminism revision of Jungian thought." -- Estella Lauter

Pratt explores how female and male poets in England and North America respond to apatriarchal religious and mythological systems in four archetypes: Medusa, Aphrodite, Artemis, and bears.

ANNIS PRATT taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an archetypal critic who started her career writing about Dylan Thomas's use of Welsh religion and myth and went on to examine the archetypes women novelists have used for the last three centuries in her now-classic Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction.