Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Ancient and Classical

Born in the latter half of the fifth century B.C. near Athens, Xenophon enjoyed the best of educational and social advantages and for a time was a pupil and friend of Socrates. In 401 B.C., however, he was led by promises of adventure and fortune to join the ill-fated expedition of Cyrus against his brother, Artaxerxes the Second of Persia. After Cyrus lost his life and the other officers were murdered, Xenophon became one of the leading spirits of the army, eventually exacting revenge on the Persians, then retiring to Scillus, in Elis, to a life of sporting and literary activity. It was...

In The Odes of Horace, Steele Commager examines the odes with particular attention both to their language and structure and to the effect a poem is intended to, or does, produce. Horace's conciseness and apparent clarity phrase by phrase tempt us into believing that there is an equally concise and clear meaning to be assigned to a poem, or even to his thought as a whole. Yet Horace has no systematic philosophy to impart; his poems record only an imaginative apprehension of the world. Each ode is a calculated assault on our sensibilities, a deliberate invasion of our consciousness. Only by...

In his introduction to the volume, editor William S. Anderson provides essential background information, discussing Ovid s life, the reception of the Metamorphoses during Ovid s day and after, and the poem s central issues. The...

Introduced by Francis Fergusson, the Poetics, written in the fourth century B.C., is still an essential study of the art of drama, indeed the most fundamental one we have. It has been used by both playwrights and theorists of many periods, and interpreted, in the course of its two thousand years of life, in various ways. The literature which has accumulated around it is, as Mr. Fergusson points out, "full of disputes so erudite that the nonspecialist can only look on in respectful silence." But the Poetics itself is still with us, in all its suggestiveness, for the modern...

Nothing in the "Aeneid "is more evident to each generation of readers than the interaction of time levels throughout the poem s structure.

Elisabeth Henry argues that the interrelation of these different levels of awareness in the narrative is a major subject of the poem. There are also national or collective memories, embodied in names or institutions, that Virgil links to the people and places of his legendary narrative. Thus, though Aeneas story is one man s storyit is also the history of a people and the enactment of the meaning of that history."

The Orpheus myth has fascinated Western culture from the sixth century B.C. to the present.

This book defines, through a survey of the European tradition of literature, art, poetry, and music, some of the philosophical and psychological implications and developments of that myth. A number of the main expressions of the Orpheus tradition are considered in detail: the Ovidian romances of the Middle Ages, the tragic love story of Renaissance opera (but not of "The Magic Flute), "and, in the earlier tradition of Orpheus as savior or shaman, the poem known as "The Testament of Orpheus" and...

"The reprint edition will be most welcome to classicists, comparatists, and students of literary theory. No existing translation of the Poetics even approaches the quality and accuracy of Leon Golden s, and O.B. Hardison s accompanying commentary makes the book eminently useful as a text for literary criticism and literature-in-translation courses."--Roy Arthur Swanson, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"The Golden-Hardison translation and commentary offer some of the clearest and most persuasive explanations of Aristotle s key terms....

We've become accustomed to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks being trotted out by conservatives in the name of timeless virtues. At the same time, critics have charged that multiculturalists and their ilk have hopelessly corrupted the study of antiquity itself, and that the teaching of Classics is dead.

Trojan Horses is Page duBois's answer to those who have appropriated material from antiquity in the service of a conservative political agendaamong them, Camille Paglia, Allan Bloom, and William Bennett. She challenges cultural conservatives' appeal to the authority of the classics by...