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Amorous jealousy is not a monster, as Shakespeare's venomous Iago claims. It is neither prickly and bitter fancy nor a cruel and mean passion, nor yet a symptom of feeble self-esteem. All those who have experienced its wounds are well aware that it is not callous, nasty, delusional and ridiculous. It is just painful. Yet for centuries moralists have poured scorn and contempt on a feeling that, in their view, we should fight in every possible way. It is allegedly a disease to be treated, a moral vice to be eradicated, an ugly, pre-modern, illiberal, proprietary emotion to be overcome. Above all, no one should ever admit to being jealous. So should we silence this embarrassing sentiment? Or should we, like the heroines of Greek tragedy, see it as a fundamental human demand for reciprocity in love? By examining its cultural history from the ancient Greeks to La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Kant, Stendhal, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre and Lacan, this book demonstrates how jealousy, far from being a 'green-eyed' fiend, reveals the intense and apprehensive nature of all erotic love, which is the desire to be desired. We should never be ashamed to love.
Explores ancient sexuality, focusing on symbolism as well as on beliefs, and explores the concept of the female body in Greece before the impact of Christianity.
The author looks at sensuality and sexual desire in the Greek, Roman and early Christian worlds, demonstrating how modern concepts of sexuality emerge from the practices and theories of the ancient world. In particular, she draws a distinction between pleasure and desire, and analyses the different ways in which men and women were seen to experience erotic feeling, looking at the portrayal of transgressive women such as Medea, Clytemnestra and Jocasta. Based on the literature and philosophy of the time. Originally published as 'Eros tiranno: Sessualità e sensualità nel mondo antico' (2003).
This volume brings together a number of scholars to consider the book Utopia, its long afterlife, and specifically its effects on political activists over the centuries.
The first Christians operated with a hierarchical model of sexual difference common to the ancient Mediterranean, with women considered to be lesser versions of men. Yet sexual difference was not completely stable as a conceptual category across the spectrum of formative Christian thinking. Rather, early Christians found ways to exercise theological creativity and to think differently from one another as they probed the enigma of sexually differentiated bodies. In Specters of Paul, Benjamin H. Dunning explores this variety in second- and third-century Christian thought with particular attention to the ways the legacy of the apostle Paul fueled, shaped, and also constrained approaches to the ...
Discusses the legal, social, and religious position of women in the Greco-Roman world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and modern era.
A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success--according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the dreamer's sexual psychology. Evidence of such shifts in perspective is leading scholars to reconsider in a variety of creative ways the history of sexuality. In these fifteen original essays, eminent cultural historians and classicists not only discuss sex, but demonstrate how norms, practices, and even the very definitions of what counts as sexual activity have varied significantly over time. Ancient Greece offers abundant evidence for a rad...
A history of the conflict between East and West, from the struggles between the Greeks and the Persians in classical antiquity, through the wars between Islam and Christendom in the Crusades, to the modern clash of European Enlightenment and then colonialism with the Islamic societies of the East, culminating in the continuing tensions of the twenty-first century.
The question of ‘identity’ arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one’s own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very ‘different’. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of ‘gender’ is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in th...
Reception studies has profoundly transformed Classics and its objects of study: while canonical texts demand much attention, works with a less robust Nachleben are marginalized. This volume explores the discipline from the perspectives of marginality, canonicity, and passion, revealing their implications for its past and future development.