Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (.), 2007. XI,313p. ills. (B&W photographs). Cloth wrps. 'Culture and Sacrifice is a marvellous work of scholarship: ambitious, disquieting and profound in its historical and philosophical ramifications. Like a sort of postmodern Sir James Frazer, Hughes explores ritualized human sacrifice across an astonishingly diverse array of literary, artistic and musical works, taking in everyone from the Greeks and Goethe to Wagner and Thomas Mann. The story he tells is a disturbing, even appalling one - a veritable feast at the House of Atreus. But you cannot finish the book without a new and vastly deepened understanding of sacrifice's primal, ferocious, strangely productive role in human art and culture.' (TERRY CASTLE).

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Bibliographic Details

Title: Culture and Sacrifice. Ritual Death in Literature and Opera.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2007
Language: English
ISBN 10: 0521867339
ISBN 13: 9780521867337
Binding: Hardcover

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Synopsis

Human sacrifice has fascinated Western writers since the beginnings of European literature. It is prominent in Greek epic and tragedy, and returned to haunt writers after the discovery of the Aztec mass sacrifices. It has been treated by some of the greatest creative geniuses, including Shakespeare and Wagner, and was a major topic in the works of many Modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence and Stravinsky. In literature, human sacrifice is often used to express a writer's reaction to the residue of barbarism in his own culture. The meaning attached to the theme therefore changes profoundly from one period to another, yet it remains as timely an image of cultural collapse as it did over two thousand years ago. Drawing on sources from literature and music, in this 2007 book Derek Hughes examines the representation of human sacrifice in Western culture from The Iliad to the invasion of Iraq.

Book Description

Human sacrifice has fascinated Western writers since the beginnings of European literature. Drawing on sources from literature and music, in this 2007 book Derek Hughes examines the representation of human sacrifice in Western culture from The Iliad to the invasion of Iraq.

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Scrinium Classical Antiquity, member of the Dutch Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (NVvA - ILAB), stands for a specialized stock of new, secondhand and antiquarian books about Classical Antiquity. The main theme of our books is Classical Antiquity: texts and commentaries, translations, archeology, philosophy, travel, history, mythology, books for young people, philology, law, reception of classical motives in Middle Ages, Renaissance and our own time and neo-Hellenika (conptemporary Greece), and many more subjects. A more modest quantity of our books concerns countries, civilisations and religious movements on the edges of the classical world: e.g. Egypt, Middle East and Early Christianity.

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