
Eidolon
Sandeep Parmar(Author)
Shearsman Books (Publisher)
Published on 15. January 2015
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-1-84861-392-8 (ISBN)
Description
Partly a modern revision of the Helen myth, Eidolon meditates on the visible and invisible forces of Western civilisation from classical antiquity to present-day America. An Eidolon is an image, a ghost, a spectre, a scapegoat. It is a device, like deus ex machina, to deal with the problem of narrative, specifically Helen's supposed deceit and infidelity. The Eidolon, as a device, is something beauteous and beguiling - as a thing, or as a preoccupation, it is the siren song to the poet who listens for silence. Who gives Helen her voice and what need unites it into a single, constant loathsome creature? Helen is as much the city of Troy as its famed plains and high walls. It might as well be Helen smouldering on the great pyre of defeat, even though she escapes unscathed in Homer's Odyssey and is restored to her husband's side by the eidolon's unique guarantee of her chastity.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
120 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-392-8 (9781848613928)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sandeep Parmar was born in Nottingham in 1979 and was raised in Southern California. She received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008 on the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is the Reviews Editor of The Wolf magazine and edited The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees for Carcanet Press (2011). Her critical book on Loy, Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies, appeared from Bloomsbury in 2013. She teaches twentieth-century literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool.