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This book investigates the idea of comic seriousness in Old Comedy. The issue has been a vexing one in classical studies, and the most traditional stance has been that Aristophanes' comedies reflect his personal ideology, reducing the plays to little more than political speeches. Riu concludes, in contrast, that we should abandon our preconceptions about comic seriousness and approach the language of Aristophanes with care and precision, alert to the nuances of meaning that the comic genre entails. Attempting to set Old Comedy in its proper context, Riu explores the myth and ritual of Dionysus in the city-state (including a reading of Euripides'Bacchae and other sources) and relates the patterns found in those myths to the works of Aristophanes. The book concludes with a section on the relationship between comedy and reality, the import of insults in comedy, comedy as ritual, the relationship between author and character, and the seriousness of comedy. With an appendix that examines the exceptional case ofClouds, Dionysism and Comedy is an important resource for students and scholars of classical comedy and the comedic genre
This volume comprises the revised versions of selected papers read at the International Conference on the Ancient Novel (Groningen, July 2000). The papers cover a wide range of scholarly issues that were prominent in the programme of the conference, and feature the most recent approaches to research on the ancient novel. The essays combine judicious use of literary theory with traditional scholarship, and examine the ancient novels and related texts, such as Oriental tales and Christian narrative, both in their larger, literary, cultural and social context, and as sources of inspiration for Byzantine and modern fiction. This book is important not only for classicists and literary historians, but also for a general public of those interested in narrative fiction.
This volume explores the literary representation of male sexual dysfunction and discusses the natural and supernatural elements of an ancient folk medical system based on conceptual associations between male sexuality and specific plants, animals and minerals. The work incorporates material from both literary and scientific sources to draw parallels between ancient and modern paradigms of healing. The literary depiction of attempts to remedy impotence demonstrates how an accessibility to cures contributes to the sexual and social reintegration of the sufferer. The Satyrica of Petronius echoes this process by means of the text itself and so effects similar ends. The book provides new insights into literature and the ancient belief systems underlying it with its original and integrative approach to disciplines such as philology, botany, mineralogy, zoology and medicine.
Criticism on the textual and iconographic construction of the city is extensive, yet the problem of historical change in representations of "the urban" has received little attention. Believing traditional accounts are limited by their reflection of a specific historical moment, Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay focus, by contrast, on transition. In essays written for this volume, scholars of literary and visual studies, the history of architecture, cultural theory, and urban geography explore the ways perceptual or conceptual paradigms of the city supersede or replace others, while at the same time retaining the "after-image" of what went before. The writers touch on a wide variety of ...
Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions s...
Two standpoints govern the approach taken to the poetry of Salvador Espriu in this extended study of his work. First, the author explores the structural implications of symmetry and numerology, in a chronological rather than thematic survey of the poetry - a procedure that involves a consideration of how each book attains its distinctive character while having common preoccupations and stylistic traits. Secondly, he examines the tension implicit in Espriu's poetry between involvement and detachment or between the civic and the lyric.
Συναγωνίζεσθαι, the ancient Greek verb chosen as the title of this volume, belongs to the jargon of dramaturgy as employed by Aristotle inPoetics, where he emphasizes the function of the Chorus as an active co-protagonist in the dynamics of drama. Here it suggests the collaborative nature of this Festschrift offered to Guido Avezzù in the year of his retirement by friends and colleagues. The volume collects a wide selection of contributions by international scholars, grouped into four sections: Greek Tragedy (Part 1), Greek Comedy (Part 2), Reception (Part 3), and Theatre and Beyond (Part 4). The Authors. A. Andrisano, P. Angeli Bernardini, A. Bagordo, A. Bierl, S. Bigliazzi, ...
La tragedia de Sófocles Antígona ha sido objeto de innumerables versiones, interpretaciones y traducciones a lo largo de la historia de la cultura occidental. La acción de la joven hija de Edipo que entierra a su hermano Polinices a pesar de la expresa prohibición real, la rebeldía de una mujer que arrastra consigo la turbulenta historia de su linaje, ha permitido replantear cuestiones esenciales de la existencia humana todavía vigentes. Antígona alumbra aún hoy problemas tales como la cuestión del derecho al duelo –allí donde hay todavía muertos sin enterrar o desaparecidos a los que no les ha sido restituida su dignidad simbólica–, experiencias como la muerte del otro, así como la decisión de la muerte propia consentida, la cuestión tan debatida hoy en torno a la fraternidad como cimiento de lo común, y aun la temática del género que las filosofías feministas de la diferencia se hanpropuesto repensar a partir de esta obstinada figura. Los textos que constituyen el presente volumen tratan de dar cuenta de las diversas aproximaciones que la tragedia de Antígona ha suscitado.
The focus of this book is medieval vernacular literature in Western Europe. Chapters are written by experts in the area and present the current scholarship at the time this book was originally published in 1996. Each chapter has a bibliography of important works in that area as well. This is a thorough and reliable guide to trends in research on medieval Arthuriana.