Literature and the Gods

By: Roberto Calasso

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Synopsis: From the internationally acclaimed author ofThe Marriage of Cadmus and HarmonyandKa, a stunning summation of his lifelong study of the role of the gods in the human imagination. Based on the prestigious Weidenfeld Lectures Roberto Calasso gave at Oxford in May 2000,Literature and the Godstraces the return of pagan divinities to Western literature from their first reappearance at the beginning of the modern era to their place in the literature of our own time. Calasso sets out to uncover the divine— godly or otherwise—in specific texts, and finds it in what he calls "absolute literature. " With its roots in early Vedic verse, absolute literature reached the apex of its expression during the period beginning with the German Romantics in 1798 and ending with Mallarmé's death in 1898. But Calasso also discovers the divine in the work of Valéry, Auden, Yeats, Montale, Borges, and Nabokov, and he reveals how these writers, in their own very particular ways, were articulating the same unnameable thing. Finally, he delineates the timeless, ever-mysterious laws that surround the creative act itself. WithLiterature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso profoundly deepens our understanding of our literary tradition. It is, itself, a literary masterpiece.