D. Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice. Ritual Death in Literature and Opera

HUGHES, Derek, Culture and Sacrifice. Ritual Death in Literature and Opera, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 326 p.
ISBN-13 9780521867337


RÉSUMÉ

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, Derek Hughes examines the representation of human sacrifice in Western culture from the Iliad to the invasion of Iraq.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

1. Human sacrifice, ancient and modern

2. Greece

3. Virgil to Augustine

4. The discovery of America

5. Shakespeare and the economics of sacrifice

6. Britain and America: Dryden, Behn, and Defoe

7. Lieto Fine: Baroque and Enlightenment sacrifice

8. The French Revolution to Napoleon

9. The secularization of sacrifice

10. Gothic sacrifice

11. Wagner

12. The second coming of Dionysius

13. Pentheus 1913

14. Sparagmos

15. Hitler and after

Bibliography.