The Tale Of Archais

This early work of poetry, by Aleister Crowley, was originally published in 1898. Born in Royal Leamington Spa, England in 1875, Crowley was raised by Christian fundamentalist parents. He attended Trinity College at Cambridge University, but left before graduating. After leaving the college, he devoted his time to studying the occult, and travelled extensively throughout the world in persuit of its secret knowledge. He went on to become a prolific writer, producing essays, prose and poetry on a wide range of subjects. To this day he remains a highly influential figure, both in occult circles and popular culture. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions.

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.

The book of outstanding researchers A.G. Vinogradov and S.V. Zharnikova is devoted to the study of the ancestral home of the Indo-European peoples: Indian, Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, German, Celtic, Romance, Albanian, Armenian and Greek language groups. The book is devoted to archaic images of North Russian folklore. The book was written in 1989-90, but could not be published in Russia. Over the past time, additional materials have appeared that confirm the opinion of the authors.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini’s own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini’s Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker’s project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization’s formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini’s feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker’s part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salò, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.