Reading Sappho

Reading Sappho PDF Author: Ellen Greene
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Reading Sappho considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Essays are divided into four sections: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition", "Ritual and Social Context", and "Women's Erotics". Contributors focus on literary history, mythic traditions, cultural studies, performance studies, recent work in feminist theory, and more. A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Re-Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.

Reading Sappho

Reading Sappho PDF Author: Ellen Greene
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading Sappho considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Essays are divided into four sections: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition", "Ritual and Social Context", and "Women's Erotics". Contributors focus on literary history, mythic traditions, cultural studies, performance studies, recent work in feminist theory, and more. A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Re-Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.

Among Women

Among Women PDF Author: Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Women's and men's worlds were largely separate in ancient Mediterranean societies, and, in consequence, many women's deepest personal relationships were with other women. Yet relatively little scholarly or popular attention has focused on women's relationships in antiquity, in contrast to recent interest in the relationships between men in ancient Greece and Rome. The essays in this book seek to close this gap by exploring a wide variety of textual and archaeological evidence for women's homosocial and homoerotic relationships from prehistoric Greece to fifth-century CE Egypt. Drawing on developments in feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, as well as traditional textual and art historical methods, the contributors to this volume examine representations of women's lives with other women, their friendships, and sexual subjectivity. They present new interpretations of the evidence offered by the literary works of Sappho, Ovid, and Lucian; Bronze Age frescoes and Greek vase painting, funerary reliefs, and other artistic representations; and Egyptian legal documents.

Sappho

Sappho PDF Author: Marguerite Johnson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472538668
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This series of short incisive books introduces major figures of the ancient world to the modern general reader, including the essentials of each subject's life, works, and significance for later western civilisation. In the newly created tradition of the "Ancients in Action" series, Marguerite Johnson has written a fascinating and accessible account of what remains of the life and works of the Greek poet, Sappho. Sappho's ancient biography is covered in addition to the post-classical accounts of her life, which continue to appear, in a variety of creative and non-creative contexts, in contemporary literature and art. Sappho's poetry, essentially preserved in tantalising fragments, is discussed in a series of thematic chapters that include her religious writings, particularly directed to the goddess of love, Aphrodite; personal interpretations of mythological themes; marriage hymns; and love songs to female companions.

The Lesbian Lyre

The Lesbian Lyre PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Duban
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1905570805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
Hailed by Plato as the “Tenth Muse” of ancient Greek poetry, Sappho is inarguably antiquity’s greatest lyric poet. Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, and writing amorously of women and men alike, she is the namesake lesbian. What’s left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary. Shrouded in mystery, she is nonetheless repeatedly translated and discussed – no, appropriated – by all. Sappho has most recently undergone a variety of treatments by agenda-driven scholars and so-called poet-translators with little or no knowledge of Greek. Classicist-translator Jeffrey Duban debunks the postmodernist scholarship by which Sappho is interpreted today and offers translations reflecting the charm and elegant simplicity of the originals. Duban provides a reader-friendly overview of Sappho’s times and themes, exploring her eroticism and Greek homosexuality overall. He introduces us to Sappho’s highly cultured island home, to its lyre-accompanied musical legends, and to the fabled beauty of Lesbian women. Not least, he emphasizes the proximity of Lesbos to Troy, making the translation and enjoyment of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey a further focus. More than anything else, argues Duban, it is free verse and its rampant legacy – and no two persons more than Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – that bear responsibility for the ruin of today’s classics in translation, to say nothing of poetry in the twentieth century. Beyond matters of reflection for classicists, Duban provides a far-ranging beginner’s guide to classical literature, with forays into Spenser and Milton, and into the colonial impulse of Virgil, Spenser, and the West at large.

Aphrodite's War

Aphrodite's War PDF Author: Andrea Busfield
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409094642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
THE ISLAND IS DIVIDED, BUT ONE MAN'S LOVE WILL NEVER BE COMPROMISED... Cyprus, 1955 - a guerrilla war is raging and four Greek brothers are growing up to the familiar sounds of exploding bombs and sniper fire. Determined to avenge the death of his elder brother and to win the heart of his beloved Praxi, young Loukis joins a cell of schoolboy terrorists operating in the mountains. But when his cohorts blow themselves up in a freak accident, he returns home in shock, yearning for the warm embrace of his family - and of his sweetheart. But his adored Praxi is now married to someone else, and playing at her feet is a young toddler...

Grief Lessons

Grief Lessons PDF Author: Euripides
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590171806
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. “Euripides,” the classicist Bernard Knox has written, “was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.” His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless—women and children, slaves and barbarians—for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides’ plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides’ latest tragedies. Four of those tragedies are here presented in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They areHerakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family;Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor’s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors;Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fableAlkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” and “Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra.”

Hypatia

Hypatia PDF Author: Silvia Ronchey
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111245756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This study reconstructs Hypatia’s existential and intellectual life and her modern Nachleben through a reception-oriented and interdisciplinary approach. Unlike previous publications on the subject, Hypatia explores all available ancient and medieval sources as well as the history of the reception of the figure of Hypatia in later history, literature, and arts in order to illuminate the ideological transformations/deformations of her story throughout the centuries and recover “the true story”. The intentionally provocative title relates to the contemporary historiographical notion of “false” or “fake history”, as does the overall conceptual and methodological treatment. Through this reception-oriented approach, this study suggests a new reading of the ancient sources that demonstrates the intrinsically political nature of the murder of Hypatia, caused by the phtonos (violent envy) of the Christian bishop Cyril of Alexandria. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the figure of Hypatia addressed to both academic readers – in Classics, Religious Studies, and Reception Studies – and a learned, non-specialist readership. Revised edition in paperback.

Poetry & Language Writing

Poetry & Language Writing PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1781388083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
It has been variously labelled ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Language Writing’, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing’ (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and ‘language-centred writing’. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that ‘it’ has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry, reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding the movement. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten.

Chasing Aphrodite

Chasing Aphrodite PDF Author: Jason Felch
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547538022
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist). In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum, and tell a story of outlandish characters and bad behavior that could come straight from the pages of a thriller. “In an authoritative account, two reporters who led a Los Angeles Times investigation reveal the details of the Getty Museum’s illicit purchases, from smugglers and fences, of looted Greek and Roman antiquities. . . . The authors offer an excellent recap of the museum’s misdeeds, brimming with tasty details of the scandal that motivated several of America’s leading art museums to voluntarily return to Italy and Greece some 100 classical antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astonishing and penetrating look into a veiled world where beauty and art are in constant competition with greed and hypocrisy. This engaging book will cast a fresh light on many of those gleaming objects you see in art museums.” —Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting

The Laughter of Aphrodite

The Laughter of Aphrodite PDF Author: Peter Green
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917154
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Best-selling classicist Peter Green recreates the life and times of the Greek lyric poet Sappho in this beautifully conceived, sharply detailed work of historical imagination. We meet Sappho at the age of fifty, when she is shaken by her fatal and final love affair with Phaon. She narrates her own story from the vantage point of self-questioning middle age, and her candid meditations make intimate, engrossing reading. Only fragments of Sappho's poetry survive. In imagining Sappho's life Green found his task "rather like that of an archaeologist reassembling some amphora from hundreds of shards—of which more than half are missing." Yet, in his synthesis of historical evidence and ebullient invention, Green produces a seamless, moving, and persuasive portrait. He recreates Sappho's life by interweaving her surviving poetry into the narrative, not as quotations, but as her own imagined speeches and thoughts. Sappho's life spanned one of the most exciting periods in Greek history. Green's novel, full of details about daily life on ancient Lesbos, draws the reader into the political and social climate of her world: the civil strife accompanying the transition from aristocracy to mercantilism, the household relations between slave and aristocrat, the details of sea travel in the Aegean. Green wrote the novel while living on Lesbos, and his graceful rendering of the landscape, the rhythms of the seasons, and the varied flora of Sappho's island pervades the narrative. Sappho's poetry reveals a direct, spontaneous woman who eschewed artifice and embellishment. Green's extraordinary talent captures those qualities and brings this woman of unflinching honesty very much to life. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993. Best-selling classicist Peter Green recreates the life and times of the Greek lyric poet Sappho in this beautifully conceived, sharply detailed work of historical imagination. We meet Sappho at the age of fifty, when she is shaken by her fatal and final l