L’equivoco del bianco

Between the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with Nietzsche, Rohde and Bachofen, there was a change of direction in the reinterpretation of the Hellenic world, seen not only as the place of Apollonian balance but as an ambivalent reality characterized by the manifestation of irrational forms of thought, especially on the ground of ritual practice: an aspect analyzed and highlighted by the comparative studies of Frazer, Dodds, Burkerdt and Kerényi, true watersheds in scientific research on the religiosity of the ancient Mediterranean. Linked together by similarities and cross-references, the ten essays that make up this book illustrate different aspects of that Nachleben of classical civilization which constitutes a constant reference parameter for literature, music and visual arts at the turn of the two centuries, highlighting how both the icy Winckelmannian reading and the Edenic vision proposed by German Romanticism are often contradicted by the emergence of a phenomenology of the unconscious capable of giving voice to the anxieties that dot modernity.

(Automatic translation by Bing)