List of tables and figures
Preface and Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction: desperately seeking Ariadne - the cultural legacy of Minoan Crete

Chapter 2. Sons of Europa: from medical remedies for constipation to bestiality, sexually transmitted death, and the dawn of the 'Minoan Age' (from antiquity to mid-19th c.)

Chapter 3. Rediscovering European origins: Ariadne as the Great Mother Goddess (mid-19th century-World War I)

Chapter 4. Minoans and World Wars (c. 1915-1949): the Aryan revenge

Chapter 5. The Minoans in the Cold War and swinging sixties: from the end of the Greek civil war to the end of the Colonels' dictatorship (c. 1949-1974)

Chapter 6. Minoan paradises lost and regained: from cannibalism to postmodernism (c. 1975-1999)

Chapter 7. Minoan cultural legacies - every age has the Minoans it deserves and desires

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Shortlisted for the European Association of Archaeologies 2023 book prize

In Search of the Labyrinth explores the enduring cultural legacy of Minoan Crete by offering an overview of Minoan archaeology and modern responses to it in literature, the visual and performing arts, and other cultural practices. The focus is on the twentieth century, and on responses that involve a clear engagement with the material culture of Minoan Crete, not just with mythological narratives in Classical sources, as illustrated by the works of novelists, poets, avant-garde artists, couturiers, musicians, philosophers, architects, film directors, and even psychoanalysts - from Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust to D.H. Lawrence, Cecil Day-Lewis, Oswald Spengler, Nikos Kazantzakis, Robert Graves, André Gide, Mary Renault, Christa Wolf, Don DeLillo, Rhea Galanaki, Léon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Mariano Fortuny, Robert Wise, Martin Heidegger, Karl Lagerfeld, and Harrison Birtwistle, among many others. The volume also explores the fascination with things Minoan in antiquity and in the present millennium: from Minoan-inspired motifs decorating pottery of the Greek Early Iron Age, to uses of the Minoans in twenty-first-century music, poetry, fashion, and other media.