Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature

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Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature is written by Piero Boitani and published by BRILL. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 9004453679 (ISBN 10) and 9789004453678 (ISBN 13).

Anagnorisis has been called ‘one of the great works of comparative literary criticism of our time’. It is a book that spans the millennia, the adventures of Ulysses in Homer and God’s mysterious appearance to Abraham in Genesis, down not only to Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, but also to Dumas’ Count of Montecristo, Borges’s ‘The Immortal’, and Walcott's Omeros. ‘Anagnorisis’ means ‘recognition’. Aristotle defined it simply as ‘the passage from ignorance to knowledge’. But the knowledge one gains in anagnorisis is neither scientific nor abstract – it is living knowledge in the flesh, as Euripides’ Helen understood when, seeing her husband again after many years, she exclaimed: ‘to recognize those we love is a god.