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This chapter explores the rediscovery of The Golden Ass. Evidence of first-hand acquaintance with The Golden Ass exists from the beginning of the trecento. By the middle of the 14th century, copies are in the hands of the leading humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio. By the end of the century, Psyche has been re-enthroned in the Genealogia, and The Golden Ass is on its way to becoming part of the common property of the Italian Renaissance.

This chapter discusses Apuleian influences in The Faerie Queene. It argues that Spenser used different parts of The Golden Ass in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Meroë and Pamphile contributed to the pool of attributes from which Duessa and Acrasia emerged, and the combination of Homeric, Italian, and Apuleian elements was, by and large, an effective one. The account of Psyche's fall supplied a screen behind which Una could be clothed in the human colours that strict allegory would deny her, while Apuleius' description of her exile and her responses to trials and adversity provided a backdrop against which the virtues both of Una and Guyon could be measured. But it is when Spenser — in Muiopotmos as well as in The Faerie Queene — makes explicit reference to ‘Cupid and Psyche’ that the difficulties really begin.

This chapter briefly extends the consideration of human understanding and the visionary imagination to Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn. It looks towards two arguments in relation to Ode to Psyche. It then tries to show that the idea of reverie is not primarily escapist, but rather has a longer intellectual history in Enlightenment understandings of the mind. The partial images of Ode on a Grecian Urn are only partial if they are expected to conform to an idea of truth that is prescriptive or instrumental in its orientation. Keats' reflections on truth and beauty in his letters, and his repeated emphasis on the revelatory nature of the imagination, point to the influence of Idealist thinkers; but in Ode to Psyche he follows empirical theories of perception in implying that sense data are basically copies of objects or ideas that can subsequently be recreated in the mind.

This chapter examines how John Keats in his early poetry borrows the perceptual pattern that structures so many of William Wordsworth's poems: a state of inattention or dreaminess punctuated by a sudden sound or “gleam.” The Keatsian surprise typically involves an unexpected thing that is somehow expected, an accessibility to novelty grounded in repetition and familiarity. In his poetry, Keats gave nuanced accounts of surprise: mixtures of the expected and the accidental, corporeal shock and cognitive reckoning, external stimulus and internal emotion, unknowing and recognition. This chapter also reads the “Ode to Psyche” and the “Ode on Melancholy,” both of which conceive of surprise—and emotion more generally—in mythological terms.

This chapter introduces Basile’s seminal The Tale of Tales, the first collection of literary fairy tales of the Western tradition. In particular, this chapter studies how the seventeenth-century Italian author reinterprets the concepts of ‘oral’ and ‘written.’ Basile’s baroque tales read like transcriptions of oral storytelling although they are literary inventions. The main goal of this chapter is the analysis of Basile’s two retellings of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The myth of Cupid and Psyche is the first myth-fairy tale of the Western tradition and Basile’s book is the first collection of tales of modern Europe. After a brief survey of the medieval and Renaissance philosophical and theological interpretations of this myth, this chapter shows how Basile composes two opposite retellings of the Latin tale.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century collection of Sicilian folk tales collected by Laura Gonzenbach. In particular, it focuses on a tale that echoes Basile’s two versions of the Cupid and Psyche myth. The close reading of the Gonzenbach version shows important differences between seventeenth-century Naples, where Basile wrote his book, and nineteenth-century Sicily. The oral Sicilian tale is more coherent and more moral than Basile’s literary tale. The image of the woman is more conventional in the oral tale than in the literary one.

This chapter examines “The Myrtle,” one of the most famous tales from Basile’s collection. Although the myth of Cupid and Psyche is still the foundation of this tale, “The Myrtle” also heavily borrows from the Apollo and Daphne myth. The dialogue between the two mythic tales leads to a sequence of reversals in the figures of Cupid and Psyche.

This chapter studies the Grimms’ summaries (also defined as adaptations) of Basile’s fifty tales in The Tale of Tales. In particular, this chapter focuses on the Grimms’ transformations of Basile’s two versions of the Cupid and Psyche myth, the topic of the first chapter of this book. This chapter brings to the fore the subtle changes that the Grimms introduce in their adaptations in order to make the baroque Italian tales more moral and acceptable to a German sensibility.

Creativity, in the context of traditional arts, is more about finding inventive combinations of well-known elements than about coming up with something entirely new. Within conservatories, the masters used annual contests to reward or weed out students who were good or bad at combining various learned schemas in artistic ways. The chapter examines some harmony assignments completed by Claude Debussy. While he was one of the most original composers in music history, he was also very good at combining traditional schemas in response to a given melody or bass. Two of his assignments for the class of Émile Durand are among his earliest known musical expressions.

Early in the De nuptiis, Martianus states that Mercury selects Philology as bride only after discovering that a number of other young women are unavailable. One of them is Psyche, held in adamantine chains in the lair of Cupid. Mention of this allegorical figure for the human soul is accompanied by an account of the gifts she received from the gods at birth. Pallas gave her a cloak of wisdom, Apollo a wand of prophecy, Vulcan flames to light her way, and Remigius reads this reference to Venus bequeathing sexual desire to humanity in lapsarian terms, interpreting the goddess's gifts of voluptas and illecebra as the predisposition to carnal sin that was occasioned by the Fall.

This chapter compares the Rgveda, the early Upanishads, and Plato's Timaeus for their conception of the universe, the inner self, and the relation between them. All three texts envisage the universe as a hierarchically organised system in which order (rta in the Rgveda) prevails. But only in the Timaeus is there the motivation to create a cosmos endowed with beauty and goodness. Only in the Timaeus and the Upanishads is cosmology a prerequisite for self-knowledge and ethics, and both texts lay the foundations for moral realism, the belief in the objective validity of moral values.

This chapter adapts Foucault's concept of technologies of the self to the production, by means of certain composite psychophysical practices, of a post-mortem immortal self. Such technologies of self-immortalisation are examined in the Plato's Timaeus (self-immortalisation through the practice of philosophy) and in the ritual construction of an immortal self (atman) in the construction of the Vedic fire altar (agnicayana). There are both similarities and differences between the Greek and Indian practices.

This chapter studies the Platonic aspects of the Metamorphoses and applies the modern concept of the ‘philosophical novel’ to it. With the help of this critical tool, it presents a new reconciliation between Platonism and entertainment, philosophy and fiction. In a preliminary section the concept of the ‘philosophical novel’ and its relevance for antiquity is discussed. After that, a survey of the philosophical potential of the ancient novel in general is given and the most important philosophical features of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses are considered at length. The long inserted story of Cupid and Psyche is crucial to this reading. The chapter finishes with a brief conclusion about how these features add up to a structurally significant whole beyond the simple polarity of the question ‘seriousness v. comedy’.

In this chapter, the author deploys a psychoanalytic hermeneutic to interpret the life of St. Teresa. The author develops three characteristics of Theresa’s thinking: the ideal father, the re-sexualization of the ideal father by the mystic (a pere-version), and the oral gratification of the Eucharist. Teresa’s “incarnated fantasies” of the ideal father who persecutes her are transformed into a loving father, expressed in a unique narrative in which Teresa becomes a “psyche-some” below the threshold of consciousness. These visions re-emphasize the denigrated senses, such as touch.

This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who integrate print and manuscript technologies to produce a new materiality in autographic texts that capture their idiolectic voices. They deploy scribal practices in print media to inscribe individuality, autographing the print copies of their works to transform them from uniform products into objects embodying vital processes. Illuminated printing enables Blake to make each copy of his texts a unique graphic object, most expansively in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Coleridge’s habitual revision of his printed texts destabilizes each version to re-engage the immediacy of poetic vision through a vocalized experience, most dramatically in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Tighe initially rejects print publication for the affective palpability of scribal publication but then inscribes privately printed copies of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love to specific members of her coterie, a process her coterie continues after Tighe dies. All three explore the implications of being bound in bookish or human form in their poems even as they use the materiality of their autographic texts to reconfigure a print publication system that might otherwise lock them or their texts into fixed identities or commodities.

Chapter 3 discusses how the singer and writer Bea Palya explored dimensions of women’s experience in Hungary that had been kept private before the 2000s. The chapter describes one of Palya’s first solo projects with composer Samu Gryllus, a setting of Sandor Weöres’s Psyché; Weöres’s postmodernist poetry collection explores sexuality, violence, and other facts of life for its female protagonist. The chapter describes how this project enabled Palya to connect autobiography and art, and details how Palya balanced a modern sexual image with other performances dramatizing Christian spirituality. Although Palya fused local folk sounds with Asian music, West Europeans wanted to emphasize the Romani part of Palya’s multiethnic background with a ragged Gypsy image. The chapter details how Palya was able to reject this pressure, since Hungarian audiences accepted her treatment of race as an everyday matter within a larger frame of modern feminine experience.

Marcus Folch, in “A Time for Fantasy: Retelling Apuleius in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces,” focuses on the retelling of the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche (from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses) in what Lewis regarded as his best book. Folch argues that Lewis, who is shown elsewhere to have been critical of ‘false medievalism’ in modern fantasy, offers a reflexive commentary in Till We Have Faces that problematizes the privileged position occupied by the medieval in fantasy’s evocations of space and time, deliberately contrasting the medieval with classical models. In this reading, Lewis’s imagined world changes from realistic to fantastic, becoming infused with supernatural presence, precisely when medieval structures are replaced by the classical. Folch suggests that Lewis refashions Apuleian myth in order to offer competing interpretations of the fantastic, produce hesitation in the reader, and thereby point to problems in how we read fantasy.