In Seneca’s Hercules Furens there are two distinct narratives with opposing objectives, one authored by Juno, the other by Hercules. The former seeks to prevent the hero from becoming a god, by ...directing him to carry out an assault on heaven and eliminate his family, and the latter seeks to implement his vision of the new Golden Age by purging the world of remaining evils. As the two plans collide, they generate confusion in the minds of both Hercules and Amphitryon, in part because Juno is able to exploit Hercules’ own overweening ambition. The play associates this kind of ambition with tyrannical behavior. When Hercules’ Juno-sent frenzy results in the slaughter of his family, the tragic hero is rendered an intratextual double of the tyrant Lycus, fulfilling the tyrant’s goal of eliminating the Theban royal line. This constitutes an attack on Thebes itself, the earthly analogue of heaven. This poetological dimension – in which Hercules’ acts follow his own scripted vision set beside that devised by Juno – constitutes a significant Senecan innovation vis-a-vis the Euripidean Ἡρακλῆς Μαινόμενος in its treatment of the mythic plot. The dual authorship and ultimate overlap of the two previously opposed plotlines highlight the complex nature and meaning of Hercules’ responsibility.
Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in classical studies in the ways meaning is generated through the medium of intertextuality, namely how different texts of the same or different ...authors communicate and interact with each other. Attention (although on a lesser scale) has also been paid to the manner in which meaning is produced through interaction between various parts of the same text or body of texts within the overall production of a single author, namely intratextuality. Taking off from the seminal volume on Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations, edited by A. Sharrock / H. Morales (Oxford 2000), which largely sets the theoretical framework for such internal associations within classical texts, this collective volume brings together twenty-seven contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the evolution of intratextuality from Late Republic to Late Antiquity across a wide range of authors, genres and historical periods. Of particular interest are also the combined instances of intra- and intertextual poetics as well as the way in which intratextuality in Latin literature draws on reading practices and critical methods already theorized and operative in Greek antiquity.
Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis' Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, ...exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and 'reality'; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.
Trends in Classics, a new series and journal to be edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos, will publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts ...the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications will seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. The series Trends in Classics Studies welcomes monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and collections of papers; it will provide an important forum for the ongoing debate about where Classics fits in modern cultural and historical studies. The journal Trends in Classics will be published twice a year with approx. 160 pp. per issue. Each year one issue will be devoted to a specific subject with articles edited by a guest editor.
Roman Drama and Its Contexts Frangoulidis, Stavros; Harrison, Stephen J; Manuwald, Gesine
2016, 2016-03-21, Letnik:
34
eBook
Trends in Classics, a new series and journal to be edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos, will publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts ...the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications will seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. The series Trends in Classics Studies welcomes monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and collections of papers; it will provide an important forum for the ongoing debate about where Classics fits in modern cultural and historical studies. The journal Trends in Classics will be published twice a year with approx. 160 pp. per issue. Each year one issue will be devoted to a specific subject with articles edited by a guest editor.
This is the first in-depth study of Apuleius' Metamorphoses to look at the different attitudes characters adopt towards magic as a key to deciphering the complex dynamics of the entire work. The ...variety of responses to magic is unveiled in the narrative as the protagonist Lucius encounters an assortment of characters, either in embedded tales or in the main plot. A contextualized approach illuminates Lucius' relatively good fortune when compared to other characters in the novel ? this results from his involvement with the magic of a sorcerer's apprentice, rather than that of a real witch, and signals the possibility of eventual salvation. A careful investigation of Lucius' attitude towards Isis in book 11 and his relationship with the witch-slave girl Photis earlier on suggests that the novel's final book may be read as a second " Metamorphoses", consciously rewritten from a positive perspective. Last but not least, the book also breaks new ground by examining the narrative structure of the Metamorphoses against the background of the typical plotline found in the ideal romance. The comparison shows how Apuleius both follows and alters this plot, exploiting the genre to his own specific ends, in keeping with his central theme of metamorphosis.
This paper explores how Menaechmus II of Syracuse unintentionally succeeds in removing Menaechmus I, his Epidamnian twin, from a society which has been exploiting him. The process of withdrawal runs ...through the play, and is achieved in two stages in which Menaechmus II assumes his twin brother’s meta-dramatic role: in the first play the newly arrived brother alienates the Epidamnian twin from his immediate social and family milieu; and in the second he almost leads the Epidamnians to have his brother isolated within the community on account of the latter’s alleged insanity. As servus bonus, Messenio initially discourages Menaechmus II from comic merrymaking, thus impeding the reunion of the siblings, but later assists in forwarding the plot: he thwarts the Epidmanians’ intention to seclude him and eventually facilitates the recognitio between the twins as well as their final decision to return to their native land. Thus, Menaechmus II’s quest for his twin, which seems to have been deferred when he first arrives in Epidamnus, is prepared for and effectively carried through via the evolution of meta-plots.
The opening Act of Seneca’s
dramatizes the construction of a broader play within a play on the demise of the house of Tantalus, in which Furia is a meta-poet. The narrow plot in
proper, where Atreus ...appears as both instigator and inset poet, dramatizes only one aspect of the broader drama by Furia, thus functioning as an illustration of how everything foretold in her speech will come to pass. The open-ended closure of the narrower play with its reference to Thyestes’ prayer to the avenging gods brings to mind the theme of continuing revenge within the family, as outlined by Furia. This dialogical interaction between the beginning and end of Thyestes allows the audience to prefigure that Atreus will not be the eventual champion of tragic plot, as he arrogantly asserts at the play’s end, but that revenge will continue in the next generation of the same house, exactly as foreshadowed in the opening Act.
Space in the Ancient Novel Michael Paschalis, Stavros Frangoulidis
2002, 20021231, 2002-12-31, Letnik:
1
eBook
This special issue of Ancient Narrative Supplementum 1, entitled 'Space in the Ancient Novel', brings together a collection of revised papers, originally presented at the International conference ...under the same title organized by the Department of Philology (Division of Classics) of the University of Crete and held in Rethymnon, on May 14-15, 2001. This conference inaugurated what is hoped to become a new series of biennial International meetings on the Ancient Novel (RICAN, Rethymnon International Conferences on the Ancient Novel) which aspires to continue the reputable tradition of the Groningen Colloquia on the Novel, established by Heinz Hofmann and Maaike Zimmerman. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 1 includes two additional contributions by Catherine Connors and Judith Perkins, both originally presented in ICAN 2000 at Groningen in July 25-30, 2000 and included here in revised form, and an article by Stelios Panayotakis, which closely relates to the theme of the Rethymnon conference.
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