Dancing With Goddesses: Archetypes, Poetry, and Empowerment (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Pratt offers here an excellent and thorough study of Medusa, Aphrodite, and Artemis... An excellent study for students of myth, of modern literature, and of criticism (especially psychological, archetypal, and biographical criticism)." Choice "Annis Pratt, with absorbing ability, blends oppositional ideas and factions into a brilliant discussion about meaning in literature, myth, and poetics. She creates an insightful structural analysis that references archetypalists, myth critics, feminist theologians, feminist neo-Jungians, and feminist archeologists. But it is her own sub-textual voice running under the words, her insistence that her inquiry be one of passionate intensity rather than one of unyielding codification, that ultimately causes her work to be truly original, truly valuable." Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves "Provides a mature and useful alternative to hegemonic Freudian and Lacanian approaches to literature and psychology and a significant feminism revision of Jungian thought." Estella Lauter --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

Dr. Annis Pratt brings to her work not only the manners of trustworthy scholarship, but also an absorbing ability to blend oppositional ideas and factions into a brilliant discussion about meaning in literature, myth and poetics. Gathering a bounty of poetry and lyric lines from authors in Canada, Britain, and the United States, Dr. Pratt creates an insightful structural analysis that references archetypalists, myth critics, feminist theologians, feminist neo-Jungians, and feminist archeologists. The voices of men as well as women inhabit her lyceum. But more so, it is her own sub-textual voice running under the words, her insistence that her inquiry be one of passionate intensity rather than one of unyielding codification, that ultimately causes her work to be truly original, truly valuable. - Clarissa Pinkola Est s, Ph.D., diplomate psychoanalyst, author of "Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype". Provides a mature and useful alternative to hegemonic Freudian and Lacanian approaches to literature and psychology and a significant feminist revision of Jungian thought. Its scope, from ...the medieval to the present in history, and the prepatriarchal to the apatriarchal in culture, is especially impressive. - Estella Lauter. In "Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction" Annis Pratt showed how archetypes structuring women's novels contain apatriarchal religious and mythological systems antecedent to European patriarchy. These archetypes celebrate a powerful and complex femininity. In this volume she explores how female and male poets in England and North America respond to these older signatures in four archetypes: Medusa, Aphrodite, Artemis, and bears. She shows how poems are structured on the interplay between more recent Euro-patriarchal patterns and apatriarchal elements from the archetypes' deeper historical background. Pratt discusses how the former draw poets toward unhealthy domination over or victimization of women and nature. The latter lead them to transcend self-loathing and gynophobia and celebrate the human body as it is embedded in the natural world. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr (September 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253208653
• ISBN-13: 978-0253208651
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,915,875 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)