Monsters in Greek Literature: Aberrant Bodies in Ancient Greek Cosmogony, Ethnography, and Biology

ISBN-13: 9780367555450 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 210 str.

Fiona Mitchell

Opis

Monsters in Greek literature are often thought of as creatures which exist in epic narratives, however, as this book shows, they appear in a much broader range of ancient sources and are used in creation narratives, ethnographic texts, and biology to explore the limits of the human body and of the human world.

Recenzje

"This study is a welcome contribution to an area of scholarship that is ripe for elaboration. The monstrous appears throughout all kinds of literature, and Fiona Mitchell has taken a group of texts and used their contrasting depictions of monsters to understand their relationship to one another and to the literature that follows them. I would describe this work as a generous and attentive survey." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part 1 – Cosmogony; Chapter 1 – Hesiod's Theogony; Chapter 2 – The Orphic Theogonies; Part 2 – Ethnography; Chapter 3 – Herodotus; Chapter 4 – Ctesias and Megasthenes; Part 3 – Biology; Chapter 5 – Aristotle; Conclusion; Index

O autorze

Fiona Mitchell is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her primary research interests are the representation of bodily abnormality in antiquity, creation narratives, and ancient conceptions of time. She has published chapters and articles on bodies in Greek cosmogonic narratives and omens in Herodotus, and is the editor of the forthcoming collection Time and Chronology in Creation Narratives.