Helen Of Troy

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood is a comprehensive examination of the ways in which Helen's story has been told and re-told from the ancient world to the present day. In this wide-ranging literary biography, Laurie Maguire analyzes ongoing debates about Helen's sexual culpability, as seen through the prism of society's evolving attitudes to issues such as beauty and rape. The aesthetic and narrative difficulties that ensue when literature translates myth are also considered, yet through it all, we see how Helen of Troy's contradictory legacy has transcended the ages and endured in literature. Works by Homer, Euripides, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and others are explored, as well as Helen's resurgent popularity in a surprising variety of modern novels, plays, and films.

In an engaging and original new work filled with scholarly insights, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood takes readers on an epic voyage into the literary representations of a woman who has wielded a great influence on Western cultural consciousness for more than three millennia.

T.L. Cooksey - Library Journal

While the face of Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, it has inspired equally as many depictions. Maguire (English, Univ. of Oxford; How To Do Things with Shakespeare) is concerned with Helen's "literary afterlife," the different ways she has been portrayed in Western literature, from the eighth century B.C.E. (Homer) to the present (Derek Walcott). She is struck by the paradox that while Helen was the cause of so much action, she is often represented only on the narrative margin. Maguire's approach is thematic rather than chronological, including the ambiguities in Helen's mythical story, her beauty, her abduction, her guilt, her role in the Faust tradition, and her presence in various modern parodies. While largely focusing on a rich array of literary sources-classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern-she also draws on art and film. Combining wit, learning, and insight, Maguire offers delightful reading both for the specialist and for the serious general reader. Highly recommended.

Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at Oxford University and has authored or edited six previous books, including Studying Shakespeare and the popular Where There's a Will There's a Way. She has lectured widely at literary festivals in the U.S. and U.K.