Arion’s lyre Benjamin Acosta-Hughes
2010., 20100104, 2010, 2010-01-04
eBook
Arion's Lyreexamines how Hellenistic poetic culture adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed Archaic Greek lyric through a complex process of textual, cultural, and creative reception. Looking at the ...ways in which the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides was preserved, edited, and read by Hellenistic scholars and poets, the book shows that Archaic poets often look very different in the new social, cultural, and political setting of Hellenistic Alexandria. For example, the Alexandrian Sappho evolves from the singer of Archaic Lesbos but has distinct associations and contexts, from Ptolemaic politics and Macedonian queens to the new phenomenon of the poetry book and an Alexandrian scholarship intent on preservation and codification.
A study of Hellenistic poetic culture and an interpretation of some of the Archaic poets it so lovingly preserved,Arion's Lyreis also an examination of how one poetic culture reads another--and how modern readings of ancient poetry are filtered and shaped by earlier readings.
In Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, author Arum Park explores two notoriously difficult ancient Greek poets and seeks to articulate the complex relationship between them. ...Although Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, previous scholarship has often treated them as representatives of contrasting worldviews. Park’s comparative study offers the alternative perspective of understanding them as complements instead. By examining these poets together through the concepts of reciprocity, truth, and gender, this book establishes a relationship between Pindar and Aeschylus that challenges previous conceptions of their dissimilarity. The book accomplishes three aims: first, it shows that Pindar and Aeschylus frame their poetry using similar principles of reciprocity; second, it demonstrates that each poet depicts truth in a way that is specific to those reciprocity principles; and finally, it illustrates how their depictions of gender are shaped by this intertwining of truth and reciprocity. By demonstrating their complementarity, the book situates Pindar and Aeschylus in the same poetic ecosystem, which has implications for how we understand ancient Greek poetry more broadly: using Pindar and Aeschylus as case studies, the book provides a window into their dynamic and interactive poetic world, a world in which ostensibly dissimilar poets and genres actually have much more in common than we might think.
Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors ...and prior traditions - placing markers in their works for audiences to recognise (much like the 'Easter eggs' of modern cinema). Within antiquity, such signposting has often been considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. In this wide-ranging new study, Thomas Nelson shows that these devices were already deeply ingrained in oral archaic Greek poetry, deconstructing the artificial boundary between a supposedly 'primal' archaic literature and a supposedly 'sophisticated' book culture of Hellenistic Alexandria and Rome. In three interlocking case studies, he highlights how poets from Homer to Pindar employed the language of hearsay, memory and time to index their allusive relationships, as they variously embraced, reworked and challenged their inherited tradition.
Hellenistic poets of the third and second centuries BC were concerned with the need both to mark their continuity with the classical past and to demonstrate their independence from it. In this ...revised and expanded 2005 translation of Muse e modelli: la poesia ellenistica da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto, Greek poetry of the third and second centuries BC and its reception and influence at Rome are explored allowing both sides of this literary practice to be appreciated. Genres as diverse as epic and epigram are considered from a historical perspective, in the full range of their deep-level structures, providing a different perspective on the poetry and its influence at Rome. Some of the most famous poetry of the age such as Callimachus' Aitia and Apollonius' Argonautica is examined. In addition, full attention is paid to the poetry of encomium, in particular the newly published epigrams of Posidippus, and Hellenistic poetics, notably Philodemus.
This is the first monograph entirely devoted to the corpus of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Not only have the dithyrambs and kitharodic nomes of the New Musicians Timotheus and Philoxenus, the ...hymns of Aristotle and Ariphron, and the epigraphic paeans of Philodamus of Scarpheia and Isyllus of Epidaurus never been studied together, they have also remained hidden behind a series of critical prejudices – political, literary and aesthetic. Professor LeVen's book provides readings of these little-known poems and combines engagement with the style, narrative technique, poetics and reception of the texts with attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. In examining the protean notions of tradition and innovation, the book contributes to the current re-evaluation of the landscape of Greek poetry and performance in the late classical period and bridges a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and the Hellenistic periods.
What is distinctive about Greek lyric? How should we conceptualize it in relation to literature, song, music, rhetoric, history? This discussion investigates such questions, analysing a range of ...influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.
Through a series of critical readings this book builds a picture of the Roman reaction to, and adoption of, the Greek poetry of the last three pre-Christian centuries. Although the poetry of the ...greatest figure of Greek poetry after Alexander, Callimachus of Cyrene, and his contemporaries stands at the heart of the book, the individual studies embrace the full scope of what remains of Hellenistic poetry, both high literary productions and the more marginal poetry, such as that in honour of the great goddess Isis. The singularity of the poetry of Catullus and Virgil, of Horace and the elegists, emerges as more rich and complex than has hitherto been appreciated. Individual studies concern the poets' declared attitudes to their own work, the figure of Dionysus/Bacchus and the poetry of world conquest, the creation of similes, and the conversion of Greek bucolic into Latin pastoral.
Voices at Work Karanika, Andromache
2014, 2014-04-01
eBook
In ancient Greece, women were part of the labor force, but their experiences 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 for understanding the craft of poetry. Textile and agricultural production involved storytelling, singing, and poetry. Everyday labor employed—beyond its socioeconomic function—the power of poetic creation.
Karanika starts with the assumption that there are certain forms of poetic expression and performance in the ancient world which are distinctively female. She considers these to be markers of a female “voice” in ancient Greek poetry and presents a number of case studies: Calypso and Circe sing while they weave; in Odyssey 6 a washing scene captures female performances. Both of these instances are examples of the female voice filtered into the fabric of the epic.
Karanika brings to the surface the words of women who informed the oral tradition from which Greek epic poetry emerged. In other words, she gives a voice to silence.
The Door Ajar Grewing, Farouk F; Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin; Kirichenko, Alexander
2013, Letnik:
132
eBook
When is "closure" in fact "false closure", the deceptive opposite of apparent conclusion or perfection? 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Don Fowler's seminal essay "First ...Thoughts on Closure: Problems and Prospects" (MD 22: 75-122), a work that contributed greatly to bringing about a broad reconsideration in Ancient literary studies of the concept of closure whether understood as an ontological feature, an aesthetic concept, an appreciative inclination on the part of a work's audience or a psychological desire of the individual to control the "text" at hand. The present volume, 'The Door Ajar: False Closure in Greek and Roman Literature and Art', seeks to mark both a debt to the ongoing influence of Fowler's work, and to frame a future discourse on false closure in particular as an artistic phenomenon.
