Forming Femininity in Antiquity: Eve, Gender, and Ideologies in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve

ISBN-13: 9780199837779 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 256 str.

Vita Daphna Arbel

Opis

In Forming Femininity in Antiquity, Vita Daphna Arbel investigates depictions of the emblematic Eve that are embedded in one of the most influential accounts of Adam and Eve after the Hebrew Bible, namely the apocryphal Greek Life of Adam and Eve (GLAE) from antiquity. Treating the figure of Eve as a culturally constructed representation of ''woman, '' Arbel examines a crucial transformative stage in the literary and conceptual discourse of Eve, with a focus on several pivotal issues that have not been looked at in previous scholarship. She offers a nuanced analysis of the GLAE's multifaceted and at times contradictory portrayals of Eve and, by extension, women. She also situates these depictions in the hybrid Greco-Roman cultural world in which they emerged, and discusses the extent to which they both reflect and construct contemporaneous overlapping and competing concepts and norms regarding Eve/women's standing, role, authority, and realms of experiences. Finally, Arbel examines how the GLAE's representations of Eve/women resonate with later Jewish and Christian traditions, which often characterize the figure of Eve in accordance with views that are embedded in the GLAE, rather than in Genesis.

Recenzje

Vita Daphna Arbel's methodologically sophisticated study of the figure of Eve breaks new ground by bringing cultural questions to bear on the Life of Adam and Eve. It shows an impressive mastery of traditional scholarship, but also brings the material into interdisciplinary study of the humanities. This should prove to be a landmark study.

O autorze

Vita Daphna Arbel is Associate Professor of Biblical and Early Jewish Literature and Mysticism at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.