Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood

Preface

Source Acknowledgments

Conventions

Introduction: Ab ovo

Beginnings

Stories and Contexts

1. Narrating Myth

Whose Story?

Absence

Fragments and Narrative

Closure

The Textual Shudder

Myth and Repetition

Origins

Myth and Meaning

Causes

(En)Closure

2. Beauty

Excess and Deficiency

Narrating the Absolute

Staging the Absolute

Detailing Helen

The Beauty Effect

Helen’s Breasts

Androgyny

Helen’s Scar

Relativizng the Absolute

Helen and Old Age

Beauty: Subjectivity and Objectivity

Beauty and Nostalgia

3. Abducting Helen

Missing Moments

Homer, the Iliad

Herodotus, the Histories

Chaucer and Narrative Gaps

Helen and Cressida

The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632)

Statute Change in 1597

The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Helen (of Troy)

Rape as Revenge

4. Blame

Accounts

Casting Blame: Helen, Paris, and the Gods

Sidestepping Blame: Sympathy in the Iliad

Competing Narratives: the Odyssey

"Twisting Eulogy/And Censure Both Together"

Voicing Helen: Euripides

Helen Among the Sophists

Agency (1): Joseph of Exeter

Agency (2): Middle English Troy Books

George Peele, The Tale of Troy (1589)

Deifying Helen: John Ogle, The Lamentation of Troy (1594)

Mimetic Desire, the Scapegoat, and Blasphemy

Naming and Shaming

5. Helen and the Faust Tradition

Form and Appearance in the English Faust Book

Helen in the English Faust Book

Dr Faustus and Language

Dr Faustus and Boundaries

Goethe (1749–1832)

Goethe and Representation

Goethe and the Beauty of Language

The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

Jo Clifford (1950– )

Clifford’s Helen and Gender Politics

6. Parodying Helen

Comedy

The Novel

Caribbean Helen: Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)

Notes

References

Index