Not Every Woman is an Island: Some Notes about Isles of Women and Colonisation in the Odyssey

  • Morena Deriu
Parole chiave: Homer, Odyssey, women, island, colonisation

Abstract

Comparing some characteristics of Archaic Greek colonisation and modern colonialism, the paper reads the Odyssean motif  of the isle of women, the woman/island pair, and the related erotic imagery as the results of an interaction between historical  events and literary imagination. Indeed, besides being commonly found in ancient mythologies, isles of women are generally  considered as the mythic precursors of the vision that sees settlement of a new land as the conquest of a woman. Since the  binarism and strong sense of a superior centre common to the colonisation of the New World and colonialism do not seem  appropriate to Archaic Greece, the peculiarities of the ancient and modern erotic imageries related to the arrival of a seafarer  in a new land and the woman/island pair can be understood by considering the differences between modern Western  colonialism and the Archaic Greek decentred attitude to place, religion, and ethnicity.

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Pubblicato
2019-12-31
Come citare
Deriu, M. (2019). Not Every Woman is an Island: Some Notes about Isles of Women and Colonisation in the Odyssey. Rhesis. International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature, 10(2), 19-32. https://doi.org/10.13125/rhesis/5684
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Articoli