Book of the Sphinx

Sphinxes can be found in many places other than Egypt; on stamps, postcards, in comics, as figurines, bookends, candle-holders, brooches and amulets, in fiction and romance, in paintings and on posters. This book explores the riddle that is the sphinx. Drifting from ancient to modern times, Willis Goth Regier explores the cultural history of the shinx from ancient Egypt, Greece and Babylon, to its adoption and adaptation into Judaism and Christian traditions, and into modern art and culture. Like a chameleon, the sphinx has been transformed into many things - an angelic being, prophet, protector and guardiam. a symbol of wisdom, terror, racial violence and capitalism - but, above all, it stands as a symbol of romance, mysteru, riddle and secrecy. This book examines why Hegel selected the sphinx as his ulitmate `symbol and symbols' and why it remains such a dangerous and elusive creature even today.

"Book of the Sphinx is a delight. Willis Regier is not only very learned but also creative in making fiction, even poetry, out of the myth of the Sphinx and the histories of that myth. His own retellings are artful and compelling."--Gregory Nagy, author of Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens.

"A very accomplished, well-written book. Book of the Sphinx is immensely erudite, with a wealth of references from all historical periods, from ancient Egypt to modern times, and from the most diverse realms."—Jonathan Culler, the author of Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature.

Sought, the Sphinx seems everywhere, whether the guardian of the pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau or the beautiful man-eater with a deadly riddle, to be approached with awful caution. The Sphinx, that icon painted, sculpted, engraved, and exalted in poetry, fiction, and music, so impressed the philosopher Hegel that he pronounced the creature "the symbol of the symbolic itself." With a wealth of illustrations, Book of the Sphinx confirms Hegel's lofty judgment, finding the Sphinx everywhere: in tragedies, paintings, opera, murder mysteries, brothels, bars, and advertisements.

Pursuing the Sphinx through kaleidoscopic sightings and encyclopedic observations, Willis Goth Regier plumbs the symbol's mysteries, conducting the reader down ever more perplexing and intriguing paths. Wonderfully readable, his highly idiosyncratic tour of the ages and the arts leads at last to a conception of the Sphinx that embraces nothing less than all that is unknowable--proving once again that confronting a Sphinx is one of the most dangerous and exhilarating adventures of the imagination.

Willis Goth Regier has pursued Sphinxes at the University of Nebraska, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University. He now seeks Sphinxes at the University of Illinois