Resumen de Minoan Utopias in British Fiction, after the Thalassocracy: Lawrence Durrell’s The Dark Labyrinth and Robert Graves’ Seven Days in New Crete
“Neo-Minoanism” or “Cretomania”: a modern, mythmaking phenomenon which draws on Bronze Age Cretan civilization, which is known to us through archaeological finds (infrastructural ruins, works of art, other aspects of material culture) and scholarship, and/or its apparent memory in ancient Greek texts (histories, mythology, epic), and which refashions these through contemporary representations and discourses (“cultural texts”) as “the Minoan” – the Minoan civilization, the Minoan people, the Minoan landscape, Minoan legends, and Minoan symbols, entailing iconic figures such as the Minotaur, the labyrinth, and the ritual labrys (double axe). This modern mythmaking exercise has been prevalent in a wide array...
