SOURCE: Tsakiridou, Cornelia A. “Greece in Cocteau; Cocteau in Greece.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 26, no. 1 (2000): 21-37.

In the following essay, Tsakiridou explores the defining characteristics of Cocteau's plays, in particular his interest in Greek mythology and culture.

It is the irony of the twentieth century in the West to have been determined pervasively in art and politics by certain myths and mythologies and to have destroyed and deconstructed others. The experiments with which artists like Jean Cocteau (1898-1963) assaulted artistic conventions and social norms are now a commonplace of art practice and discourse, with a historiography that seems to confirm the resilience of the ideology that they set out to undermine or reconfigure. The question of “Cocteau's century”¹ is a challenging one, especially when it is not intended in an honorific sense as a way of reasserting our admiration for the artist and his work. If we...