Straightforward
The Narrative Construction of Heteronormativity from Homer to The Hobbit
- 965 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Straightforward
The Narrative Construction of Heteronormativity from Homer to The Hobbit
About this book
When asked to name an archetypal love story, most people will reply 'Romeo & Juliet', although some say 'Tristan & Isolde' instead. Very few will come up with a classical example, and the reason for this is simple: when you say archetypal, it is assumed you mean love between a man and a woman, and instances of this in classical accounts are rare. The reason for this is also not hard to find: as it does now, 'love' in the ancient world meant the affection of equals, and given the inferior position of women in Greek and Roman society, between the sexes is not usually where love is to be found.Straightforward examines how we got from there to here. It is a study not of the loves of real people, but of the ideal of love as it found expression in stories, stories which were often retold and reimagined by new generations and new cultures. By following these stories and the changes they underwent through the centuries Straightforward attempts to answer two related questions: 'When and why did the heterosexual ideal become normative in our narrative tradition?' and 'What was there before?'We begin in archaic Greece, with a story which was already old when Homer composed his epics...
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Information
Table of contents
- untitled
- Straightforward
- Prelude: The Heroes and the Playwrights
- Introduction: Boy Meets Girl
- 1 - A Thousand Ships, a Thousand Faces
- 2 - The Founding of the City
- 3 - King and Country
- 4 - Love in a Dark Time
- 5 - Gracious Knights and Errant Ladies
- 6 - The Greenwood
- 7 - The Blood of Troy
- 8 - Merely Players
- 9 - Losing the Plot
- 10 - The Dark Forest
- 11 - Stories for a Mongrel Race
- 12 - Getting to Know Each Other
- 13 - Silly Girls
- 14 - The New Epic
- 15 - The Women Who Changed the World
- Coda: There and Back Again
- Appendices
- Sources