Cathy Gere: Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009)

“In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle.

Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints a portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.”

Publisher University Of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226289532, 9780226289533
277 pages

Reviews: Nicoletta Momigliano (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2009), Mary Beard (The New York Review of Books, 2009), Nanno Marinatos (American Journal of Archaeology, 2010), Marnin Young (NonSite, 2011).

Publisher
WorldCat

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