Pushed to the height of its illusionistic powers during the first centuries of the Roman Empire, sculpture was largely abandoned with the ascendancy of Christianity, as the apparent animation of the material image and practices associated with sculpture were considered both superstitious and idolatrous. In Pygmalion’s Power, Thomas E. A. Dale argues that the reintroduction of architectural sculpture after a hiatus of some seven hundred years arose with the particular goal of engaging the senses in a Christian religious experience. Since the term “Romanesque” was coined in the nineteenth century, the reintroduction of stone sculpture around the mid-eleventh century has been explained as a revivalist phenomenon, one predicated on the desire to claim the authority of ancient Rome. In this study, Dale proposes an alternative theory. Covering a broad range of sculpture types—including autonomous cult statuary in wood and metal, funerary sculpture, architectural sculpture, and portraiture—Dale shows how the revitalized art form was part of a broader shift in emphasis toward spiritual embodiment and affective piety during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding fresh insight to scholarship on the Romanesque, Pygmalion’s Power borrows from trends in cultural anthropology to demonstrate the power and potential of these sculptures to produce emotional effects that made them an important sensory part of the religious culture of the era.

This book explores the relationship between ancient Greek sculpture and modern Greek poetry between 1860 and 1960. It examines in some detail poems by Vasileiadis, Rangavis, Palamas, Cavafy, Sikelianos and Seferis, and shows how these poets appropriate the art of sculpture and in what ways this contributes to our understanding of each poet's poetics. Ancient Greek sculpture and sculptural imagery related to it are inevitably associated with the Classical heritage and bring the issue of ancient tradition and its relation to the modern artist into a prominent position. What is more, sculpture is particularly important for the erotic dimension through which the poets perceive their relation with art, and each poet systematically uses the image of the sculptor to define his perception of the artist. In both cases the myth of Pygmalion may be seen as successfully embodying each poet's relation with art and tradition.

Explores how the distinctive formal and material qualities of a range of Romanesque sculpture types stimulated multisensory religious experiences. Emphasizes the power of these sculptures to "come alive" in ritual and produce emotional responses for Christians of the time.

Pushed to the height of its illusionistic powers during the first centuries of the Roman Empire, sculpture was largely abandoned with the ascendancy of Christianity, as the apparent animation of the material image and practices associated with sculpture were considered both superstitious and idolatrous. In Pygmalion’s Power, Thomas E. A. Dale argues that the reintroduction of architectural sculpture after a hiatus of some seven hundred years arose with the particular goal of engaging the senses in a Christian religious experience. Since the term “Romanesque” was coined in the nineteenth century, the reintroduction of stone sculpture around the mid-eleventh century has been explained as a revivalist phenomenon, one predicated on the desire to claim the authority of ancient Rome. In this study, Dale proposes an alternative theory. Covering a broad range of sculpture types—including autonomous cult statuary in wood and metal, funerary sculpture, architectural sculpture, and portraiture—Dale shows how the revitalized art form was part of a broader shift in emphasis toward spiritual embodiment and affective piety during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding fresh insight to scholarship on the Romanesque, Pygmalion’s Power borrows from trends in cultural anthropology to demonstrate the power and potential of these sculptures to produce emotional effects that made them an important sensory part of the religious culture of the era.

Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough,” by Tracy M. Hallstead, examines the enduring critical presence in contemporary Western culture that scrutinizes, critiques, and sizes women down in their daily lives, despite rights gained through the centuries. Pygmalion was the ancient mythical sculptor who believed that all women were essentially flawed. He therefore endeavored to chisel to perfection a statue of a woman he called “Galatea.” Like the perpetually carved and perfected Galatea, women labor under Western culture’s a priori assumption that they are flawed, yet they are often unable to account for the self-criticism and self-doubt that result from this premise. As Hallstead analyzes the culture’s requirements for the perfect woman, she traces how cultural forces permeate women’s personal lives. In calling for solutions, she resurfaces the thinking of historical women who responded, rather than reacted, to the patriarchal culture that devalued them. In engaging these women of the past, whose struggles were eerily similar to our own, Hallstead encourages a responsive feminism that becomes the clear path leading outside Pygmalion’s chamber door.

The literary school called deconstruction has long been dogged by the charge that it is unprincipled, its doors closed to the larger world of moral and social concern. J. Hillis Miller, one of America s leading teacher-critics, sets the record straight by looking into a series of fictions that allow him to show that ethics has always been at the heart of deconstructive literary criticism. Miller proves his point not by assertion but by doing deconstruction is here in the hands of a master teacher. Miller s controlling image is Ovid s Pygmalion, who made a statue that came alive and whose descendants (the incestuous Myrrha, the bloodied Adonis) then had to bear the effects of what he did. All storytellers can be seen as Pygmalions, creating characters (personification) who must then act, choose, and evaluate (what Miller calls the ethics of narration ). If storytellers must be held accountable for what they create, then so must critics or teachers who have their own stories to tell when they write or discuss stories. If the choices are heavy, they are also, Miller wryly points out, happily unpredictable. The teacher s first ethical act is the choice of what to teach, and Miller chooses his texts boldly. As an active reader, the kind demanded by deconstruction, Miller refashions each story, another ethical act, an intervention that may have social, political, and historical consequences. He then looks beyond text and critical theory to ask whether writing literature, reading it, teaching it, or writing about it makes anything happen in the real world of material history."

This title was published in 2001. Pygmalion and Galatea presents an account of the development of the Pygmalion story from its origins in early Greek myth until the twentieth century. It focuses on the use of the story in nineteenth-century British literature, exploring gender issues, the nature of artistic creativity and the morality of Greek art.