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    Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
    Unavailable
    Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
    Unavailable
    Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
    Ebook372 pages5 hours

    Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones

    By Daniel Mendelsohn

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways.

    Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer.

    This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 8, 2019
    ISBN9781681374093
    Unavailable
    Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
    Author

    Daniel Mendelsohn

    Daniel Mendelsohn’s books include The Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays, and translations of the collected poems of Sappho and C. P. Cavafy.

    Read more from Daniel Mendelsohn

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