Bloomsbury Academic Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination (IMAGINES – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts)

Review This text is an exciting entry in the study of ancient Greece and antiquities. The author skillfully weaves historical analyses of Greece, Homer's Odyssey, and ancient mythology with ethnographic considerations of the contemporary Strait of Messina. A welcomed and necessary study of the significance of ancient Greek mythology in the contemporary world. -- Scott A. Lukas, Professor of Anthropology, Lake Tahoe Community College, USA Product Description In the Western imagination, the Strait of Messina conjures images of ancient Greece, picturesque South Italy and the mythical Scylla and Charybdis. This volume explores the ways in which classical myths continue to shape how the Strait is perceived today, influencing selectively philhellenic constructions of heritage and enticing locals to celebrate the landscape of the Odyssey, appropriate Homer as their fellow citizen, and purport themselves as the heirs of the Greeks and original Westerners, at the expense of their more diverse identities in the Mediterranean and beyond. Homer set the tale of Ulysses facing two fearsome marine monsters in the Strait between Calabria and Sicily, and since then it has preserved its mythical significance within a Mediterranean playground of such landmarks. Travellers and tourists have played Ulysses by re-enacting his journey since the Grand Tours, while scholars and explorers have explained myths as metaphors of marine whirlpools and animals, and artists have refashioned them in the cultures of fantasy and horror. Tracing the reflections of the Strait as a landmark of Greek antiquity within different iconographical traditions, Marco Benoît Carbone develops a historical and ethnographic treatment of how landscape and heritage become sites of memory and identity. The volume explores in particular how the real village of Scilla has become a place-myth in contemporary imagination and media―a chronotope, elsewhere in space and time, defined chiefly by its literary aura in connection with the region's ancient heritage. About the Author Marco Benoît Carbone is a Lecturer at Brunel University, London, UK. He received his PhD in Intercultural Studies and worked as a Teaching Assistant at University College London, then becoming an Honorary Research Fellow. He specialises in cultural theory, media history, and social research methods.