Americans and the Experience of Delphi

Paul Lorenz and David Roessel, Editors
With a Foreword by Tom Papademetriou

978-1-935244-11-0

About the Book

At the beginning of the twentieth century, philhellenic American writers and artists were inspired and influenced by their love of Greece and especially Delphi, known in ancient times as the navel of the universe. Several of these writers and artists visited or moved to Greece, including Eva Palmer Sikelianos, who was celebrated for her role in the Delphic Festivals of 1927 and 1930; George Cram Cook, one of the founders of the famed Provincetown Players; writer Susan Glaspell; and poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); and writer Henry Miller.

The scholarly studies in the present volume explore the symbiotic relationship between Delphi and these American philhellenes, who incorporated Delphic and ancient Greek ideals into their work, and thus changed the course of American literature. At the same time, a little piece of America has been fused into both the ancient site and the modern village of Delphi.

About the Editors

Paul H. Lorenz is a professor of English and chair of the Department of English, Theatre and Mass Communication at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. David Roessel is the Peter and Stella Yiannos Professor of Greek Language and Literature at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and the author of In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination.

Contents

• Stones that once were [a] temple, Susan Glaspell
• Eva Palmer Sikelianos Before Delphi, Artemis Leontis
• Myth, Mystique, Nietzsche, and the “Cultic Milieu” of the Delphic Festivals, 1927 and 1930, Gonda Van Steen
• George Cram Cook’s Road to the Temple, Linda Ben-Zvi
• The Value of Home: Susan Glaspell’s Fugitive’s Return as a Response to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Barbara Ozieblo
• The Influence of George Cram Cook’s Delphic Spirit on Eugene O’Neill, Mike Solomonson
• Susan Glaspell’s Delphi and the Legacy of Jane Ellen Harrison, Martha C. Carpentier
• Female Charioteers in Susan Glaspell’s Plays: Re-visiting the Spirit of Delphi and Aristotle’s Poetics in Inheritors, The Verge, and The Comic Artist, Noelia Hernando-Real
• The Noble Peasant: Primitivism, Classicism, and the Epistemological Pivot in Susan Glaspell’s Career, Michael Winetsky
• “For you know that Greece is the chord I thrill to!”: The Philhellenic Friendship of George Cram Cook and John Alden, Steven Wertzberger and Victoria Conover
• Introduction to Essay by Neith Boyce
• A Iowa to Delphi, Neith Boyce
• A Journey toward Gnosis: The Place of Delphi in H.D.’s Majic Ring, Demetres Tryphonopoulos 12 H.D.’s Ion: The Door Swings Both Ways, Matte Robinson • The Road from Delphi: Henry Miller and Greece, Ian S. MacNiven
• The Omphalos and the Pythia in Lawrence Durrell, Paul H. Lorenz