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Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children's songs, hymns, p...
The songs of working women are reflected in Greek poetry and poetics. In ancient Greece, women's daily lives were occupied by various forms of labor. These experiences of work have largely been forgotten. Andromache Karanika has examined Greek poetry for depictions of women working and has discovered evidence of their lamentations and work songs. Voices at Work explores the complex relationships between ancient Greek poetry, the female poetic voice, and the practices and rituals surrounding women’s labor in the ancient world. The poetic voice is closely tied to women’s domestic and agricultural labor. Weaving, for example, was both a common form of female labor and a practice referred to...
The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys...
Despite the relevance of astrology in Graeco-Roman mentality, our information about the early period of Hellenistic astrology is marred by the scarcity of original sources. Personal astrology did not take off until the late Hellenistic period, due to the more substantial Hellenization of Mesopotamia facilitating the import of Babylonian theories. The most relevant doctrines, mostly surviving as references and partial paraphrases in later authors and astrological miscellanies, are attached to the pseudepigraphical names of Nechepsos and Petosiris, which have been traced back to the Egyptian Demotic tradition. Critodemus, who is classified as a later author even if Firmicus Maternus invokes hi...
A new approach for teaching Modern Greek, using songs, poems, cartoons, and contemporary dialogues
"Rhetoric, broadly conceived as the art of making things matter, is both a practice and theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a "practical art." By practical art, they mean methods tested in practice, by trial and error, with a goal of offering something useful and teachable. This volume presents just such an account of rhetoric. The account here does not turn away from theory, but rather presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The approaches ventured in this volume are inspired...
Right from the beginning, classical literature has been embroiled with questions of authenticity, fakes, frauds, and, of course, scandal. Issues of dubious authorship, and contested authority confront philologists, critics and publishers today as surely as they did in the classical era itself. The new era of postmodernism, however, encourages us to look at the work of the forger with fresh eyes, and recent scholarship reflects this in an interdisciplinary approach which goes well beyond the conventional academic endeavor to separate the authentic from the fake. Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature comprises essays from an international cast of scholars who, in their diverse and creative approaches to questions of authenticity both old and new, radically revise the position of the forged text in the literary tradition and, in light of modern approaches of philology and literary criticism, offer exciting new strategies for understanding forgery and the play with authenticity within ancient literature itself.
A prevalent view in the current scholarship on ancient religions holds that state religion was primarily performed and transmitted in oral forms, whereas writing came to be associated with secret, private and marginal cults, especially in the Greek world. In Roman times, religions would have become more and more bookish, starting with the Sibylline books and the Annales Maximi of the Roman priests and culminating in the canonical gospels of the Christians. It is the aim of this volume to modify this view or, at least, to challenge it. Surveying the variety of ways in which different types of texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient Greek and Roman religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were in use for both Greek and Roman state and private religions.
Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics. With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy. Ancient comedy has been un...
Sappho, in the words of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), was “simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all.” Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho, the namesake lesbian, wrote amorously of men and women alike, exhibiting both masculine and feminine tendencies in her poetry and life. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary, and thus ever subject to speculation and study. The Shipwreck Sea highlights the love poetry of the soulful Sappho, the impassioned Ibycus, and the playful Anacreon, among other Greek lyric poets of the age (7th to 5th centuries BC), with ver...