Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis
Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis is a broad, flexible source book of comparative literature and cultural studies. It promotes the wide-ranging presence and impact of prominent idiosyncratic personalities in fabled goddess mythology and its emphatic notions of endearment and allure.
The book brings together seven hundred acknowledged sources drawn from successive historical, global and literary eras, including principal commentaries, along with factual information and important renditions in art, prose and verse, within and beyond mainstream western culture. A lengthy, detailed introduction presents a copious documented preview of the viable adaptation and mimesis of ‘divine’ characterization and its respective centrality from the long distant past to the present day. Myth, rarely latent, demonstrates varied modes of expression and open-ended flexibility throughout the six comprehensive chapters which illuminate and probe, in turn, aspects of the ideological presence, sensibilities, trials and triumphs and interventions of the goddess, whether sacred or profane. Particular literary extracts and episodes range across ancient cultures alongside quite recent expressions of hermeneutics, blending myth with the contemporary in the multi-layered reception or admonishment of the goddess, whether by one designation or the other. As such, this book is wholly relevant to all stages of the evolution and expansion of a dynamic European literary culture and its leading authors and personalities.
Nora Clark is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the European University Cyprus, Nicosia. Her thematic areas of research and publication include Romanticism and its broad literary culture; evolution and heritage within the Eastern Mediterranean; Byronism and the Near East; Latin poets and Cyprus; and Near Eastern travel writing and retelling of the 16th–19th centuries. More specifically, with regard to Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis, her research focuses on the language and the literature of topoi; the evocation of mythic voices and expressionistic literary motifs in myth and religion; theories of myth and mimesis in luminosity; scope and depth in the reception of goddess myth; and translation studies and prose poetry in translation, with regard to artistic form and the migration of symbolic texts alongside the evolution of European and global culture.
“In poetry, sculpture and mythology, the names of Aphrodite and Venus have launched a thousand faces; and the colours of those faces ceaselessly blend and shift. For clearer viewing, Nora Clark has constructed a kaleidoscope in which the colliding involves entire civilisations, brought excitingly into contact with one another. Her vibrant and variegated study traces its figures with all of the precision, patience and sensitivity for which the project calls. […] These chapters follow from source to mouth the flow through time of a myth which winds about and in and out, with many a sudden sally, and which indeed appears to go on for ever. From it has come, as is abundantly demonstrated here, ‘enduring cultural capital.’ The currency in which Dr Clark’s study deals therefore remains eminently convertible, and the interest accruing for the reader is very great.”
—Peter Merchant, Principal Lecturer in English, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
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