Knossos & the Prophets of Modernism
Cathy Gere
Abstract
In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. This book relates the story of Evans's excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, ... More
Keywords: Knossos, Crete, Arthur Evans, Greek legends, Enlightenment, modernism, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 | Print ISBN-13: 9780226289533 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013 | DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226289557.001.0001 |
