Year: 2025
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This fourth and final case study turns to the role of water in Greek myths as an element relating to change. In the ancient Greek imaginary, different conceptions of bodies of water overlap and interact, blurring the boundaries of the sacred and secular realms, entangling physical environment, human existence, activity, and experience, and the powers and presence of what is more-than-human. The stories analysed in this case study reflect these interrelationships, through narratives that reveal not only perceptions and experiences of the role and nature of water in local landscape, but also the social and cultural understandings that shape those perceptions. This study identifies two water-related categories of transformation stories: first, stories concerned with freshwater, where the underlying narrative pattern speaks of remembrance and commemoration. Across the stories in this category, it is profound emotional experiences that prompt these changes, establishing them, or commemorating them, in the landscape, through the ceaseless flow of rivers and springs. Secondly, it examines stories about the transformations of bodies—particularly, as we will see, the bodies of women—in relation to the sea. Challenging previous analyses of the sea in these myths as a ‘liminal space’, it argues for its centrality as a narrative symbol for communicating experiences. On the one hand, these tales tell of profound, cosmological change; on the other hand, in their underlying, repeating pattern of separation, metamorphosis, and rebirth, they convey the embodied experience of traumatizing violence and extreme emotion.
Author: Esther Eidinow
Institution: University of Bristol
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4414041909