The Politics of Form in Greek Literature

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature PDF Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350162662
Category : Greek literature
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"The Politics of Form in Greek Literature explores the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender). Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences."--

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature PDF Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350162662
Category : Greek literature
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
"The Politics of Form in Greek Literature explores the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender). Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences."--

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature PDF Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350162647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The Politics of Form in Greek Literature explores the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender). Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences.

Euripides and the Politics of Form

Euripides and the Politics of Form PDF Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202370
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits—from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense—shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated—and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature PDF Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350191590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The Politics of Form in Greek Literature explores the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender). Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences.

Classical Greek Oligarchy

Classical Greek Oligarchy PDF Author: Matthew Simonton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Classical Greek Oligarchy thoroughly reassesses an important but neglected form of ancient Greek government, the "rule of the few." Matthew Simonton challenges scholarly orthodoxy by showing that oligarchy was not the default mode of politics from time immemorial, but instead emerged alongside, and in reaction to, democracy. He establishes for the first time how oligarchies maintained power in the face of potential citizen resistance. The book argues that oligarchs designed distinctive political institutions—such as intra-oligarchic power sharing, targeted repression, and rewards for informants—to prevent collective action among the majority population while sustaining cooperation within their own ranks. To clarify the workings of oligarchic institutions, Simonton draws on recent social science research on authoritarianism. Like modern authoritarian regimes, ancient Greek oligarchies had to balance coercion with co-optation in order to keep their subjects disorganized and powerless. The book investigates topics such as control of public space, the manipulation of information, and the establishment of patron-client relations, frequently citing parallels with contemporary nondemocratic regimes. Simonton also traces changes over time in antiquity, revealing the processes through which oligarchy lost the ideological battle with democracy for legitimacy. Classical Greek Oligarchy represents a major new development in the study of ancient politics. It fills a longstanding gap in our knowledge of nondemocratic government while greatly improving our understanding of forms of power that continue to affect us today.

Sophocles and Alcibiades

Sophocles and Alcibiades PDF Author: Michael Vickers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317492927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist, Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. In this book, Michael Vickers challenges this view and argues that Sophocles makes regular and extensive allusion to Athenian politics in his plays, especially to Alcibiades, one of the most controversial Athenian politicians of his day.Vickers shows that Sophocles was no closeted intellectual but a man deeply involved in politics and he reminds us that Athenian politics was intensely personal. He argues cogently that classical writers employed hidden meanings and that consciously or sub-consciously, Sophocles was projecting onto his plays hints of contemporary events or incidents, mostly of a political nature, hoping that his audience's passion for politics would enhance the popularity of his plays. Vickers strengthens his case about Sophocles by discussing other authors - Thucydides, Plato and Euripides - in whom he also demonstrates a body of allusions to Alcibiades and others.

Greek Political Imagery from Homer to Aristotle

Greek Political Imagery from Homer to Aristotle PDF Author: Roger Brock
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780932065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
An investigation of the political imagery found in ancient Greek history, literature and culture.

The Form of Greek Romance

The Form of Greek Romance PDF Author: B. P. Reardon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400861845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In the early Roman Empire a new literary genre began to flourish, mainly in the Greek world: prose fiction, or romance. Broadly defined as a love story that offers adventure and a romantic vision of life, this form of literature emerged long after the other genres and, until recently, seemed hardly worthy of critical attention. Here B. P. Reardon addresses the growing interest in ancient fiction by providing a literary and cultural framework in which to understand Greek romance, and by demonstrating its importance as an artistic and social phenomenon. Beginning with a discussion of Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Reardon sets out the generic characteristics of the romance. He then moves through a wide range of works, including those of Longus and Heliodorus, and reveals their sophistication in terms of social observation, technique within a convention, and the stance adopted by the authors toward their own creations. Although antiquity left behind little discussion of the genre, Reardon shows how romance can be assessed within its time period by considering the practice of narrative in other Greek literature and the concept of fiction in antiquity. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry

The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry PDF Author: Charles H. Stocking
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107164265
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A new interpretation of sacrifice based on Greek myth and poetics in conjunction with recent research in anthropology.

On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics

On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics PDF Author: Mika Ojakangas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317216350
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book explores the origins of western biopolitics in ancient Greek political thought. Ojakangas’s argues that the conception of politics as the regulation of the quantity and quality of population in the name of the security and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as the western political thought itself: the politico-philosophical categories of classical thought, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle, were already biopolitical categories. In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. Yet although the Western understanding of politics was already biopolitical in classical Greece, the book does not argue that the history of biopolitics would constitute a continuum from antiquity to the twentieth century. Instead Ojakangas argues that the birth of Christianity entailed a crisis of the classical biopolitical rationality, as the majority of classical biopolitical themes concerning the government of men and populations faded away or were outright rejected. It was not until the renaissance of the classical culture and literature – including the translation of Plato’s and Aristotles political works into Latin – that biopolitics became topical again in the West. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the field of social and political studies, social and political theory, moral and political philosophy, IR theory, intellectual history, classical studies.