Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Ancient and Classical

In The Mourning Voice, Nicole Loraux presents a radical challenge to what has become the dominant view of tragedy in recent years: that tragedy is primarily a civic phenomenon, infused with Athenian political ideology, which envisions its spectators first and foremost as citizens, members of the political collective. Instead, Loraux maintains, the spectator addressed by tragedy is the individual defined primarily in terms of his or her humanity, rather than in terms of affiliation with a political group. The plays, she says, involve the spectators in the emotional expressiveness...

A study in poetic interaction, The Odyssey in Athens explores the ways in which narrative structure and parallels within and between epic poems create or disclose meaning. Erwin F. Cook also broadens the scope of this intertextual approach to include the relationship of Homeric epic to ritual. Specifically he argues that the Odyssey achieved its form as a written text within the context of Athenian civic cults during the reign of Peisistratos. Focusing on the prologue and the Apologoi (Books 9 12), Cook shows how the traditional Greek polarity between force and intelligence informs the...

Nagy challenges the widely held view that the development of lyric poetry in Greece represents the rise of individual innovation over collective tradition. Arguing that Greek lyric represents a tradition in its own right, Nagy shows how the form of Greek epic is in fact a differentiation of forms found in Greek lyric. Throughout, he progressively broadens the definition of lyric to the point where it becomes the basis for defining epic, rather than the other way around.

Despite widespread interest in the Greek hero as a cult figure, little was written about the relationship between the cult practices and the portrayals of the hero in poetry. The first edition of The Best of the Achaeans bridged that gap, raising new questions about what could be known or conjectured about Greek heroes. In this revised edition, which features a new preface by the author, Gregory Nagy reconsiders his conclusions in the light of the subsequent debate and resumes his discussion of the special status of heroes in ancient Greek life and poetry. His book remains an...

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...

Although the Iliad and Odyssey narrate only relatively small portions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, for centuries these works have overshadowed other, more comprehensive narratives of the conflict, particularly the poems known as the Epic Cycle. In The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, Jonathan Burgess challenges Homer's authority on the war's history and the legends surrounding it, placing the Iliad and Odyssey in the larger, often overlooked context of the entire body of Greek epic poetry of the Archaic Age. He traces the...

In Paradise Lost, Adam asks, -Why do I overlive?- Adam's anguished question is the basis for a critical analysis of living too long as a neglected but central theme in Western tragic literature. Emily Wilson examines this experience in works by Milton and by four of his literary predecessors: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, and Shakespeare. Each of these writers composed works in which the central character undergoes unbearable suffering or loss, hopes for death, but goes on living.

Mocked with Death makes clear that tragic works need not find their moral and aesthetic...

In recent decades, Latin love poetry has become a significant site for feminist and other literary critics studying conceptions of gender and sexuality in ancient Roman culture.

This new volume, the first to focus specifically on gender dynamics in Latin love poetry, moves beyond the polarized critical positions that argue that this poetry either confirms traditional gender roles or subverts them. Rather, the essays in the collection explore the ways in which Latin erotic texts can have both effects, shifting power back and forth between male and female. If there is one conclusion...

In the first edition of Women in Greek Myth, Mary R. Lefkowitz convincingly challenged narrow, ideological interpretations of the roles of female characters in Greek mythology. Where some scholars saw the Amazons as the last remnant of a forgotten matriarchy, Clytemnestra as a frustrated individualist, and Antigone as an oppressed revolutionary, Lefkowitz argued that such views were justified neither by the myths themselves nor by the relevant documentary evidence. Concentrating on those aspects of women's experience most often misunderstood--life apart from men, marriage, influence...

The Roman Self in Late Antiquity for the first time situates Prudentius within a broad intellectual, political, and literary context of fourth-century Rome. As Marc Mastrangelo convincingly demonstrates, the late-fourth-century poet drew on both pagan and Christian intellectual traditions--especially Platonism, Vergilian epic poetics, and biblical exegesis--to define a new vision of the self for the newly Christian Roman Empire.

Mastrangelo proposes an original theory of Prudentius's allegorical poetry and establishes Prudentius as a successor to Vergil. Employing recent...

The Roman Vergil (or 'Codex Romanus', so named by Valeriano in 1521) is one of the most precious manuscripts in the Vatican Library. Produced in Rome before the end of the 5th century AD, it is a finely designed and beautifully illuminated copy of the works of Vergil. Its influence on the development of medieval manuscript art is important in many ways; for example, the first page of the text of the Aeneid is the earliest known decorated 'incipit' page.

All twenty illuminated pages will be reproduced in sequence, with explanatory text. In the accompanying commentary, Professor Wright...

This work contains a major revision of Douglas Thomson's Catullus: A Critical Edition (1978), with the addition of a full commentary and a wholly new introduction. For the introduction and for each of the poems there is an extensive and current bibliography.

In the introduction, apart from sections on the life of Catullus, on the arrangement of the poems, and on their literary background, there is a lengthy discussion of the history of the text, as well as a review of the progress of Catullan studies from the editio princeps to the present day.

There are about...

Around 200AD, Marcus Junianus Justinus produced an abridged or 'epitomized' version of the Philippic Histories of the Augustan historian Pompeius Trogus. In doing so, he omitted all he did not find either intrinsically interesting or of use for historical examples. Over the centuries that followed, the abridgement eclipsed the original work in popularity, to the extent that Trogus' original work vanished and only Justin's version survived.

In this investigation of the language of the Epitome, the first in almost a century, J.C. Yardley examines the work to establish how much...

Peter Szondis pathbreaking work is a succinct and elegant argument for distinguishing between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics of tragedy espoused by Aristotle. The first of the books two parts consists of a series of commentaries on philosophical and aesthetic texts from twelve thinkers and poets between 1795 and 1915: Schelling, Holderlin, Hegel, Solger, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Vischer, Kierkegaard, Hebbel, Nietzsche, Simmel, and Scheler. The various definitions of tragedy are read not so much in terms of their specific philosophies, but rather in the way their views assist in...

Adventurers, explorers, kings, gods, and goddesses come to life in this "useful, entertaining and informative" story of the first great epic (The Washington Post)

Composed in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, The Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history: The Odyssey and the Bible. But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost to the world, buried beneath ashes and ruins.

David Damrosch begins with the rediscovery of the epic in 1872 and from there goes backward in time, all...

An essential step in learning and using any language is the acquisition of a working vocabulary. Many methods have been devised to help with this acquisition, all of them stressing the fundamental importance of mastering the words most frequently used. The Owen and Goodspeed word-lists in which Homeric terms are arranged according to frequency of usage, divided into categories according to parts of speech, and presented in an easy-to-use format are particularly helpful.

The word-lists are based in part upon Gehring s famed "Index Homericus" and are designed to help the student learn...