Literary memory and new voices in the ancient novel


Book Description

The papers in this volume discuss, from various perspectives, the engagement of the ancient novels with their predecessors and aim to identify and interpret the resonances, of different degrees of closeness, of those texts (Homeric epics, traditional and nuptial poetry, the historiographical tradition, Greek theatre, Latin love elegy and pantomime) as elements of an intertextual and metadiscursive play.




Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry


Book Description

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children's songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes an initiation ritual, arguing that what on the surface may seem like a transition to a new phase reveals other underlying trends that work against the concept of a passage. It further considers how emotion is staged and revisits the poetics of return by looking at patterns such as the eloping, returning, failed, and dead bride. Finally, the theme of separation and return as an exemplification of a distinct female nostos is revisited in female-authored poetry, which helps us decode the complex interweaving of wedding performances and lamentation, among other types of performance.




Re-Wiring The Ancient Novel, 2 Volume set


Book Description

The Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel, which was held in Houston, Texas, in the fall of 2015, brought together scholars and students of the ancient novel from all over the world in order to share new and significant developments about this fascinating field of study and its important place in the field of Classical Studies. The essays contained in these two volumes are clear evidence that the ancient novel has become a valuable part of the Classics canon and its scholarly attempts to understand the ancient Graeco-Roman world.




Echoing Narratives


Book Description

Intertextuality has been recognised as an important feature of ancient prose fiction and yet it has only received sporadic attention in modern scholarship, despite the recent explosion of interest in the ancient novels. This volume is intended to make a contribution towards filling this gap by drawing attention to, and throwing fresh light on, the presence in ancient Greek and Roman narratives of earlier literary echoes. While one volume is by no means sufficient to remedy the problem of the relative lack of scholarship on the topic, nevertheless it is hoped that the present collection will create scope for debate and will generate greater scholarly interest in this area. Most of the articles collected here originated in the colloquium 'The Ancient Novel and its Reception of Earlier Literature', which was held at University College Cork in August 2007. They investigate the interconnection between Graeco-Roman narratives and earlier or contemporary works, and consider ways in which intertextual exploration is invited from the readers of these texts. What prompts the reader to associate a passage with an earlier text? What triggers in a text the evocation of motifs from antecedent literature? How might we interpret an identified allusion? In what ways can intertextuality function as a device of characterisation? These are among the questions explored by the chapters in this volume, which concentrate on the 'canonical' Greek romances and the Roman novels but also cover other novel-like works, such as the Alexander Romance and Alexander's Letter to Aristotle About India, and the Story of Apollonius King of Tyre.




Greek Tragedy After the Fifth Century


Book Description

What happened to Greek tragedy after the death of Euripides? This book provides some answers, and a broad historical overview.




Memories of Odysseus


Book Description

This is a book about identity, about how the ancient Greeks saw themselves and others, and what this tells us in turn about Greek mentality and culture. It looks at voyagers and explorers, at travels in reality and in the mind, and shows what these reveal at key points in Greek history from the creation of Homer's monumental epic around 700 BC to the high Roman imperial period some eight hundred years later. The author takes us first to the journeyings of Odysseus, considering the returning warrior's concerns of witness and memory and finding in the epic the themes that will preoccupy the Greeks over the centuries. He then travels to Egypt with Herodotus, to the problematically 'barbarian' world of Persia and the Near East with Alexander the Great, to old Greece with the fictional Scythian Anacharsis, to the new Greek world under Roman domination with Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassos and Strabo, and finally to the Asia Minor of the first-century AD sage Apollonius of Tyana in the company of Philostratos. He examines both what their representations of these lands meant in their own day and how they were received in later times. He looks in particular at the importance of the invention of the barbarian and the "e;other"e;, first in the theoretical process of desribing and accounting for the outside world, and secondly at the justification it gives for the practical reshaping of alien space through conquest and assimilation - themes which have had, as he points out, a more recent resonance. Francois Hartog draws widely on ancient and modern authors to create a cultural history of ancient Greece that sheds a new and revealing light on the Greeks and the history of humankind more generally.




Greek Memories


Book Description

Greek Memories aims to identify and examine the central concepts underlying the theories and practices of memory in the Greek world, from the archaic period to Late Antiquity, across all the main literary genres, and to trace some fundamental changes in these theories and practices. It explores the interaction and development of different 'disciplinary' approaches to memory in Ancient Greece, which will enable a fuller and deeper understanding of the whole phenomenon, and of its specific manifestations. This collection of papers contributes to enriching the current scholarly discussion by refocusing it on the question of how various theories and practices of memory, recollection, and forgetting play themselves out in specific texts and authors from Ancient Greece, within a wide chronological span (from the Homeric poems to Plotinus), and across a broad range of genres and disciplines (epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, philosophy and scientific prose treatises).




Xenophon’s Ephesiaca


Book Description

After many decades of neglect, the last forty years have seen a renewed scholarly appreciation of the literary value of the Greek novel. Within this renaissance of interest, four monographs have been published to date which focus on individual novels; I refer to the specialist studies of Achilles Tatius by Morales and Laplace and those of Chariton of Aphrodisias by Smith and Tilg. This book adds to this short list and takes as its singular focus Xenophon’s Ephesiaca. Among the five fully extant Greek novels, the Ephesiaca occupies the position of being an anomaly, since scholars have conventionally considered it to be either a poorly written text or an epitome of a more sophisticated lost original. This monograph challenges this view by arguing that the author of the Ephesiaca is a competent writer in artistic control of his text, insofar as his work has a coherent and emplotted focus on the protagonists’ progression in love and also includes references to earlier texts of the classical canon, not least Homer’s Odyssey and the Platonic dialogues on Love. At the same time, the Ephesiaca exhibits stylistically an overall simplicity, contains many repetitions and engages with other texts via a thematic, rather than a pointed, type of intertextuality; these and other features make this text different from the other extant Greek novels. This book explains this difference with the help of Couégnas’ view of ‘paraliterature,' a term that refers not to its status as ‘non-literature’ but rather to literature of a different kind, that is simple, action-oriented, and entertaining. By offering a definition of the Ephesiaca as a paraliterary narrative, this monograph sheds new light on this novel and its position within the Greek novelistic corpus, whilst also offering a more nuanced understanding of intertextuality and paraliterature.




Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel


Book Description

The Greek romance was for the Roman period what epic was for the Archaic period or drama for the Classical: the central literary vehicle for articulating ideas about the relationship between self and community. This book offers a reading of the romance both as a distinctive narrative form (using a range of narrative theories) and as a paradigmatic expression of identity (social, sexual and cultural). At the same time it emphasises the elasticity of romance narrative and its ability to accommodate both conservative and transformative models of identity. This elasticity manifests itself partly in the variation in practice between different romancers, some of whom are traditionally Hellenocentric while others are more challenging. Ultimately, however, it is argued that it reflects a tension in all romance narrative, which characteristically balances centrifugal against centripetal dynamics. This book will interest classicists, historians of the novel and students of narrative theory.




Ancient Light


Book Description

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: “a devastating account of a boy’s sexual awakening and the loss of his childhood…. Seamless [and] profound ... An unsettling and beautiful work.” —Wall Street Journal Is there a difference between memory and invention? That is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he reflects on his first, and perhaps only, love—an underage affair with his best friend’s mother. When his stunted acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role playing a man who may not be who he claims, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see, with startling clarity, the gap between the things he has done and the way he recalls them. Profoundly moving, Ancient Light is written with the depth of character, clarifying lyricism, and heart-wrenching humor that mark all of Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville’s extraordinary works.