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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Locating Hercules: Mythology and the Dynamics of Allusion in Early Modern English Writing

Locating Hercules: Mythology and the Dynamics of Allusion in Early Modern English Writing

Mayne, Emily

Hardcover

Series: Oxford Textual Perspectives

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesPlays

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 15, 2027

ISBN10: 0192843044
ISBN13: 9780192843043
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jan 15 2027
Pages: 272
Language: English
Locating Hercules is a study of the reception and significance of the hero-god Hercules in sixteenth-century England, and of the sources and poetics of classical mythology in English writing c. 1540-1600. Locating Hercules provides the first full account of the reception of Hercules in early modern England, and of the literary and cultural potentialities of this multi-dimensional figure, discussing a range of 'Herculeses' across genres and forms, including the works of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.

The book provides a novel account of the early modern Hercules as a multiplex figure possessed of a range of overlapping and often contradictory generic, tonal, and geographical associations: potentially comic and/or tragic; hypermasculine and/or unmanned; part of British legendary history and/or peripheral to it. The book identifies for the first time a significant aspect of this Herculean plurality and its literary effects in a new set of texts: classical geographical writing. It shows that texts such as Strabo's Geography and Pausanias's Description of Greece circulated in early modern Britain and that these texts and their methods shape the use of classical mythology and figures in sixteenth-century literature. As such, the book reveals the distinctive status and importance of Hercules in early modern English culture and literature, and outlines a fresh way of reading mythological allusions more generally as flexible, topographically-informed elements within early modern writing.

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