A Quest for Remembrance

The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

Madeleine Scherer, Rachel Falconer, Madeleine Scherer, Rachel Falconer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000682991
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero's quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a 'memorious genre' related to but distinct from the quest narrative.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: The Long Descent into the Past
• 2 The Even Longer Descent: Notes on Genesis and Development of Ancient Egyptian Underworld Conceptions and Their Interplay with Funerary Practice
• 3 Remembering in the Real World: Katabasis and Natural Deathscapes
• 4 Lucretius’ Journey to the Underworld: Poetic Memory and Allegoresis
• 5 Memories of Rome’s Underworld in Lucan’s Civil War Narrative
• 6 The Open Door to Elysium in Lucian’s True History
• 7 The Politics of Forgetting: Descents into Memory in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
• 8 In the Depth of Water and the Heat of Fire: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Modern Descent into the Underworld
• 9 Homer and LeGuin: Ancient and Modern Desires to Be Remembered
• 10 “An Australian-made hell”: Postcolonial Katabasis in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
• 11 Memory and Forgetfulness: in Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian Underworlds
• 12 ‘All must descend to where the stories are kept’: Katabasis and Self-Reflexive Authorship in: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and The Penelopiad
• List of Contributors
• Index