![]() Quote of the Day
Devotedly, unostentatiously, Carcanet has evolved into a poetry publisher whose independence of mind and largeness of heart have made everyone who cares about literature feel increasingly admiring and grateful.
Andrew Motion
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
The Golden Fleece & Seven Days in New CreteRobert GravesEdited by Patrick Quinn![]()
Imprint: Carcanet Fiction
Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Hardback (608 pages) (Pub. Feb 2004) 9781857546538 Out of Stock
In The Golden Fleece (1944), Robert Graves liberates the tale of Jason and the Argonauts from its status as a children's story and reconstitutes it as a fully fledged epic. He fills his Argo with a colourful, quarrelsome and accident-prone crew, whose mission to recover the Golden Fleece is endangered less by enemies (who, with a little help from the gods, are readily outwitted) than by foibles such as Butes' disastrous fondness for the wrong sort of honey. Hercules, a sulkily temperamental giant, leaves the expedition halfway through, but Medea joins and saves it. The book has the narrative verve and sly wit of Graves's better-known historical novels.
Seven Days in New Crete (1949; also published as Watch the North Wind Rise) is, unusually among Graves's novels, set in the future; but it is the exact opposite of science fiction, for the New Cretans have abandoned twentieth-century technology in favour of a magical, matriarchal society in which wars are conveniently fought between breakfast and tea and casualties can be swiftly reborn. The time-travelling narrator, a distinctly Gravesian poet called Edward Venn-Thomas, is the bringer of necessary chaos. His job it is to disrupt a benign, complacent world with unsettling creativity, assisted by others with recognisable origins in the author's own life. Both books belong to the period during which Robert Graves was working on The White Goddess (1948), and they share its concerns with matriarchal deities and the creative reinterpretation of mythology. |
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Poetry
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Lives and Letters
PN Review
Video
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
The Carcanet Blog
PN Review 278: Set 5: Mondo de Sunbrilo Translated by John Gallas
read more
Apple Thieves: Beverley Bie Brahic
read more
PN Review Creative Writing Prize: 'If Only Id Known Back Then' by Jack Morris
read more
Scattered Snows, to the North: Carl Phillips
read more
Gabriel Josipovici: Partita and A Winter in Zrau
read more
Why Are You Shouting?: James Womack
read more
![]() |
![]() We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd
|