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In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or Rezeptionsästhetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the mentalité of Greece and Rome. In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were a...
The most important primary texts on homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome are translated into modern, explicit English and collected together for the first time in this comprehensive sourcebook. Covering an extensive period—from the earliest Greek texts in the late seventh century b.c.e. to Greco-Roman texts of the third and fourth centuries c.e.—the volume includes well-known writings by Plato, Sappho, Aeschines, Catullus, and Juvenal, as well as less well known but highly relevant and intriguing texts such as graffiti, comic fragments, magical papyri, medical treatises, and selected artistic evidence. These fluently translated texts, together with Thomas K. Hubbard's valuable introd...
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering po...
In Jewish Literary Eros, Isabelle Levy explores the originality and complexity of medieval Jewish writings. Examining medieval prosimetra (texts composed of alternating prose and verse), Levy demonstrates that secular love is the common theme across Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Italian texts. At the crossroads of these spheres of intellectual activity, Jews of the medieval Mediterranean composed texts that combined dominant cultures' literary stylings with biblical Hebrew and other elements from Jewish cultures. Levy explores Jewish authors' treatments of love in prosimetra and finds them creative, complex, and innovative. Jewish Literary Eros compares the mixed-form compositions by Jewish au...
Alfonso X (1221-84) ruled over the Crown of Castile from 1252 until his death. Known as "the Wise," he oversaw the production of a wealth of literature, one of the most impressive of which is the collection of songs known as the Cantigas de Santa Maria. This book offers a new perspective to the song collection, probing how the Cantigas use their music and text, together with rhetorical devices, to communicate with their desired audience.
Information about women is scattered throughout the fragmented mosaic of ancient history: the vivid poetry of Sappho survived antiquity on remnants of damaged papyrus; the inscription on a beautiful fourth century B.C.E. grave praises the virtues of Mnesarete, an Athenian woman who died young; a great number of Roman wives were found guilty of poisoning their husbands, but was it accidental food poisoning, or disease, or something more sinister. Apart from the legends of Cleopatra, Dido and Lucretia, and images of graceful maidens dancing on urns, the evidence about the lives of women of the classical world--visual, archaeological, and written--has remained uncollected and uninterpreted. Now...
The current volume comprises eighteen chapters dealing in depth with Martin Codax's work and the Vindel Parchment from five basic perspectives: literature, linguistics, codicology and ecdotics, music and history. The articles are in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or Galician, with English summaries.
A bilingual volume that reveals an intriguing world of courtly love and satire in medieval Portugal and Spain The rich tradition of troubadour poetry in western Iberia had all but vanished from history until the discovery of several ancient cancioneiros, or songbooks, in the nineteenth century. These compendiums revealed close to 1,700 songs, or cantigas, composed by around 150 troubadours from Galicia, Portugal, and Castile in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In Cantigas, award-winning translator Richard Zenith presents a delightful selection of 124 of these poems in English versions that preserve the musical quality of the originals, which are featured on facing pages. By tur...
This companion volume offers an introduction to European Portuguese literature for university-level readers. It consists of a chronological overview of Portuguese literature from the twelfth century to the present day, by some of the most distinguished literary scholars of recent years, leading into substantial essays centred on major authors, genres or periods, and a study of the history of translations. It does not attempt an encyclopaedic coverage of Portuguese literature, but provides essential chronological and bibliographical information on all major authors and genres, with more extensive treatment of key works and literary figures, and a particular focus on the modern period. It is u...