Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

By Cathy Gere

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. 

Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780226289557

Cathy Gere

Cathy Gere is a lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Chicago. She has published on a wide range of topics from witchcraft to brain banking. Her book on Knossos in Crete is forthcoming.

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Reviews for Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This cultural history of the impact Arthur Evan's fanciful interpretations of the Minoan remains at Knossos is essentially a study of how assorted cultural figures, mostly in the shadow of Nietzsche, took the enigmatic remains of the Minoans and ran with them to come up with a critique of an unsatisfactory modernity. Apart from Evans himself, such players as James Joyce, Peter Graves, Hilda Doolittle, Freud, Marija Gimbutas, and Martin Bernal are examined in this study, with particular note being taken of how Evans' image of Minoan culture inspired prophetic rhetoric of varying degrees of dottiness. One gathers that the author came to scoff but stayed to wonder at the phenomena of it all.Also, one might imagine the author extending her study, considering the propensity of British archaeologists of the first half of the twentieth century to take the archaeological remains of such cultures as Amarna Period Egypt and the Classical Maya and build utopian vistas on them that were ultimately overturned.