Svetlana Slapšak
Male idols of the ancient world
First edition: October 2018
384 pages
Price: 900 dinars
Svetlana Slapšak is a retired professor of the anthropology of the ancient world, anthropology of gender, and Balkanology. She was dean of the postgraduate Institut studiorum humanitatis (ISH) in Ljubljana. She has taught at universities in Europe and North America. She has published a large number of studies, essays, and prose works. Biblioteka XX. vek has published other works by her: Female idols of the Twentieth Century (2001), Female idols of the ancient world (2006), Ancient mythurgy – Women (2013), Flying pillau (2014) and Kupusara (2016). She has received the “Miloš Crnjanski” award (1990), the award of the American PEN Centre (1993), the award of the International Helsinki Committee (2000), the “Helen” award (2001), the “Mirko Kovač” award (2016), the Golden Sunflower award (2017), and the MIRA prize of the Women’s Section of the Slovenian PEN Centre (2017).
“The time has come to close the circle of my mythurgy (for now): after two books dedicated to women, this book is dedicated to men – gods, mortals, near-immortals, heroes, criminals, monsters, beasts and some event sites where important male figures were involved. This book, like the previous two, is not systematic, academically grounded, and scholastically explained, but rather it represents an effort to recover the chaotic body of ancient myth, which has been censored and placed into various ideological boxes, and to return it to the original state of myth as a practice of storytelling, of communicating, of unburdened and free thought and enjoyment in the human voice (…) In my first two books on ancient myths, Female idols of the ancient world and Ancient mythurgy – Women, the abandoned female contingent in ancient myths is put forward as the most productive field of mythurgy, and in this third volume ancient mythical masculinity experiences its striking variability and deconstruction. “ (from the Introduction)