Classicist Lowell Edmunds and folklorist Alan Dundes note that the Oedipus tale is not likely to ever fade from view in Western civilisation, as the tale continues to pack a critical family drama into a timeless form. Looking beyond the story related in Sophocles' drama - the ancient Theban myth of the son who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother - this book examines variations of the tale from Africa and South America to Eastern Europe and the Pacific. Taking sociological, psychological, anthropological and structuralist perspectives, the 19 essays reveal the complexities and...
Classicist Lowell Edmunds and folklorist Alan Dundes note that the Oedipus tale is not likely to ever fade from view in Western civilisation, as the t...
In the ancient myth, Oedipus ceased to be king when he discovered his crimes. Nonetheless, since the Renaissance, he has ruled the kingdom of the imagination. The twentieth century begins with the Oedipus complex in Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" and the power of the Oedipus myth continued to manifest itself in an astonishing range of artistic and intellectual work. As a volume in the "Gods and Heroes" series, this book explores a key figure in ancient myth incisively and accessibly, yet with enough scholarly detail to be an 'all-you-need-to-know' for lower level courses, a...
In the ancient myth, Oedipus ceased to be king when he discovered his crimes. Nonetheless, since the Renaissance, he has ruled the kingdom of the imag...
An indispensable guide to the myth of Oedipus this book is the first to analyze its long and varied history from ancient times to the modern day, and presented with an authoritative survey that considers Oedipus in art and music as well as in literature.
Lowell Edmunds accepts this variation as the driving force in its longevity and popularity. Refraining from seeking for an original form of the myth, Edmunds relates the changes in content in the myth to changes in meaning, eschewing the notion that one particular version can be set as standard.
An indispensable guide to the myth of Oedipus this book is the first to analyze its long and varied history from ancient times to the modern day, a...
Poetry in archaic and classical Greece was a practical art that arose from specific social or political circumstances. The interpretation of a poem or dramatic work must therefore be viewed in the context of its performance. In Poetry, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece, Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace bring together a distinguished group of contributors to reconstruct the performance context of a wide array of works, including epic, tragedy, lyric, elegy, and proverb.
Analyzing the passage in the Odyssey in which a collective delirium comes over the...
Poetry in archaic and classical Greece was a practical art that arose from specific social or political circumstances. The interpretation of a poem...
How can we explain the process by which a literary text refers to another text? For the past decade and a half, intertextuality has been a central concern of scholars and readers of Roman poetry. In Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry, Lowell Edmunds proceeds from such fundamental concepts as -author, - -text, - and -reader, - which he then applies to passages from Vergil, Horace, Ovid, and Catullus. Edmunds combines close readings of poems with analysis of recent theoretical models to argue that allusion has no linguistic or semiotic basis: there is nothing in...
How can we explain the process by which a literary text refers to another text? For the past decade and a half, intertextuality has been a central ...
This book is a detailed study of a single poem -- Horace, Odes 1.9 -- often called 'The Soracte Ode' after the mountain named in its second line. Although more than seventy articles and parts of books have been devoted to this twenty-four line poem since the beginning of the last century, Lowell Edmunds is the first scholar to apply developments in literary theory from outside the field of classics to a discussion of the ode. Specifically, he uses Hans Robert Jauss's essay on Baudelaire's "Spleen (II)" as a model for his study.
According to Edmunds, attempts to answer aesthetic...
This book is a detailed study of a single poem -- Horace, Odes 1.9 -- often called 'The Soracte Ode' after the mountain named in its second line. A...
Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of -myth- in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today?
Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparative, or theoretical perspective, each...
Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agree...
It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story's best-known incarnation is also a central Greek myth--the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War. Stealing Helen surveys a vast range of folktales and texts exhibiting the story pattern of the abducted beautiful wife and makes a detailed comparison with the Helen of Troy myth. Lowell Edmunds shows that certain Sanskrit, Welsh, and Old Irish texts suggest there was an Indo-European story of the abducted wife before the Helen myth of the Iliad became...
It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story's best-known incarnation is also a central...
