The Hellenistic West Prag, Jonathan R. W; Quinn, Josephine Crawley
10/2013
eBook
Although the Hellenistic period has become increasingly popular in research and teaching in recent years, the western Mediterranean is rarely considered part of the 'Hellenistic world'; instead the ...cities, peoples and kingdoms of the West are usually only discussed insofar as they relate to Rome. This book contends that the rift between the 'Greek East' and the 'Roman West' is more a product of the traditional separation of Roman and Greek history than a reflection of the Hellenistic-period Mediterranean, which was a strongly interconnected cultural and economic zone, with the rising Roman republic just one among many powers in the region, east and west. The contributors argue for a dynamic reading of the economy, politics and history of the central and western Mediterranean beyond Rome, and in doing so problematise the concepts of 'East', 'West' and 'Hellenistic' itself.
In eighteenth-century England, a long tradition of free composition in Latin gave way to translation of English texts into Latin or (especially) Greek. This new kind of ‘composition’ became popular ...in the reformed boarding (‘public’) schools and in the ancient universities; its social foundations lay in the new bourgeois groups thrown up by the industrial revolution, its cultural foundations in the rise of romantic Hellenism. The practice of this kind of composition became characteristic of the shared masculine world of the public schools, the universities, the London clubs and the Inns of Court. The varieties and development of this practice are surveyed, in the hope of encouraging further and more detailed analysis.
Biblical Hebrew is known for its creative avoidance of mentioning intimate body parts. Did such euphemisms continue in Greek-speaking Judaism? This article proposes that the “Greek hat” in 2 ...Maccabees 4:12 is not (or at least not only) a literal hat or a vague metaphor for Hellenism, as has been suggested through the centuries. Instead, it is a sly euphemism for a foreskin, and refers to the practice of epispasm, or the restructuring of a penis to reverse the look of circumcision. Such a reading fits well with the text’s anxiety around the gymnasium and its concern for Torah observance.
As prompted by letters of the 1960s from Mary Renault to Bryher, addressing their shared métier of historical fiction, this essay recognizes affinities, as yet largely unacknowledged, between the ...mid-century fiction of Mary Renault, often informed by her engagement with Ancient Greece, and the earlier Hellenism of modernist writer H.D., as well as the vein of modernist Hellenism H.D.’s work exemplifies. Like Renault, H.D. and other modernist writers often enlist Hellenism as historical fiction that conjures past worlds—to comment on, and provide alternative vocabulary for issues of, the present. Comparison of Renault’s and H.D.’s shared gravitation toward myths associated with the figure of Theseus—which they both engage in a spirit of revision—further illuminates the way that, like Renault’s turn to Ancient Greece, much early modernist work was animated by efforts to rethink gender and sexuality. Yet comparing Renault’s and H.D.’s retellings of myths connected with Theseus also uncovers the major areas of difference between them, revealing the patriarchal allegiances and misogynistic costs of Renault’s modes of reworking, at a marked distance from H.D.’s forms of feminist re-vision.
In A Room of One's Own , when Virginia Woolf urges women writers to expose the "dark spots" in men's psychology, she signals her own intentions for The Waves . In The Waves , Woolf targets men's ...masculinity, elite educations, brutalized boyhoods (at public schools), and their too-easy belonging to literary traditions as causes of male writers' truncated creativity. Louis, Bernard, and Neville exhibit the writerly disabilities Woolf associates with virility in Room . They are also linked to T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton Strachey, and to modernist experimentalism, realism, and homosexual Hellenism, respectively. In The Waves , Woolf differentiates her aesthetics not only from the "materialists"—H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett—but her Georgian "allies" as well—Eliot, MacCarthy, and Strachey prominent among them.
PDF
