Author: N. J. Lowe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521771764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
From Homer to Hollywood, the western storytelling tradition has canonised a distinctive set of narrative values characterised by tight economy and closure. This book traces the formation of that classical paradigm in the development of ancient storytelling from Homer to Heliodorus. To tell this story, the book sets out to rehabilitate the idea of 'plot', notoriously disconnected from any recognised system of terminology in literary theory. The first part of the book draws on developments in narratology and cognitive science to propose a way of formally describing the way stories are structured and understood. This model is then used to write a history of the emergence of the classical plot type in the four ancient genres that shaped it - Homeric epic, fifth-century tragedy, New Comedy, and the Greek novel - with insights into the fundamental narrative poetics of each.
Author: Kostas Myrsiades
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838642195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
These nine new essays on Homer's epics deal not only with major Homeric themes of time (honor), kleos (fame), geras (rewards), the psychology of Homeric warriors, and the re-evaluation of type scenes, but also with Homer's influence on contemporary film. Following the introduction and an essay which sets the historical background for the epics, four essays are devoted to fresh analysis of key passages and themes while another four turn to a discussion of the film Troy and Homer's influence on two other genres of American cinema.
Author: Emma Greensmith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108900356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This book offers a radically new reading of Quintus' Posthomerica, the first account to combine a literary and cultural-historical understanding of what is the most important Greek epic written at the height of the Roman Empire. In Emma Greensmith's ground-breaking analysis, Quintus emerges as a key poet in the history of epic and of Homeric reception. Writing as if he is Homer himself, and occupying the space between the Iliad and the Odyssey, Quintus constructs a new 'poetics of the interval'. At all levels, from its philology to its plotting, the Posthomerica manipulates the language of affiliation, succession and repetition not just to articulate its own position within the inherited epic tradition but also to contribute to the literary and identity politics of imperial society. This book changes how we understand the role of epic and Homer in Greco-Roman culture - and completely re-evaluates Quintus' status as a poet.
Author: Matthew Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350124796
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Matthew Wright brings Menander's Samia to life by explaining how it achieves its comic effects and how it fits within the broader context of fourth-century Greek drama and society. He offers a scene-by-scene reading of the play, combining close attention to detail with broader consideration of major themes, in an approach designed to bring out the humour and nuance of each individual moment on stage, while also illuminating Menander's comic art. The play dramatizes a tangled story of mistakes, mishaps and misapprehensions leading up to the marriage of Moschion and Plangon. For most of the action the characters are at odds with one another owing to accidental delusions or deliberate deceptions, and it seems as if the marriage will be cancelled or indefinitely postponed; but ultimately everyone's problems are solved and the play ends happily. Samia is one of the best-preserved examples of fourth-century Greek comedy: celebrated within antiquity but subsequently lost for many years, it miraculously came back to light, in almost complete form, as a result of Egyptian papyrus finds during the 20th century.
Author: J.D. McLarty
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 022717657X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Thecla's Devotion studies plot and character within the Thekla episode of the Acts of Paul, reading the text against contemporary pagan romance in order to explore Christian identity formation.
Author: Stephen M. Trzaskoma
Publisher: Barkhuis
ISBN: 9492444895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Bryan Reardon (1928-2009) was one of the most important and influential figures in the revival of scholarly interest in the Greek novel and ancient fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century. His organisation of the first International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN) at Bangor, North Wales, in 1976 was a landmark in the field and an inspiration to the organisers of subsequent ICANs, from which Ancient Narrative itself sprang. As editor of Collected Ancient Greek Novels (University of California Press 1989; second edition 2008), he made the Greek novels accessible to a wider readership and won a place for them in university syllabuses across the English-speaking world. This volume contains twenty essays by leading scholars of ancient fiction, who were all pupils, colleagues or close friends of Bryan Reardon, in memory of his scholarship, energy, guidance and humanity. They cover a range of topics including ancient literary theory and the conceptualisation of fiction, discussion of individual novels (Chariton, Longus, Iamblichus, Achilles Tatius, and Apuleius) and novelistic texts (a papyrus fragment of a lost novel, and Philostratus' Life of Apollonius), the afterlife of the ancient novel (in a Renaissance commentary on Roman law, in a seventeenth-century essay on the origin of the novel, and in a seventeenth-century series of paintings in a French château), and a speculative reconstruction of the morning after the end of Heliodorus' novel. The title of the volume commemorates two of Bryan Reardon's most important books: Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C. (Paris 1971) and The Form of Greek Romance (Princeton 1991); and the photograph of Aphrodisias on the front cover is a tribute to his critical edition of Chariton (2004).
Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351902598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional writers created books to be printed and sold to anonymous readers. It further claims that this period's narrative innovations emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture like print and the book market, but also from the rediscovery of a forgotten late classical text from North Africa, Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. In making these claims, Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier. Examining the divergent but interlocking careers of Robert Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, Mentz traces how through differing commitments to print culture and their respective engagements with Heliodoran romance, these authors helped make the genre of prose fiction culturally and economically viable in England. Mentz explores how the advent of print and the book market changed literary discourse, influencing new conceptions of what he calls 'middlebrow' narrative and new habits of reading and writing. This study draws together three important strains of current scholarly inquiry: the history of the book and print culture, the study of popular fiction, and the re-examination of genre and influence. It also connects early modern fiction with longer histories of prose fiction and the rise of the modern novel.
Author: vanThanh Nguyen SVD
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1621895068
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
The mission to the Gentiles and their conversion into the church gave rise to conflict in the early Christian community. Acts 11:1-18 indicates that there was clearly dissension over the issue of Peter going to the house of Cornelius and participating in table fellowship with him. The issue was no small matter, since it could have split the church. How then does Luke portray the resolution of the conflict? Instead of writing a long theological treatise, the author employs the art of storytelling. The study of Luke-Acts has long been dominated by historical-critical methods, focusing on Luke as a historian and theologian. This work, however, proposes a paradigm shift by looking at Luke as a storyteller. Since narrative criticism is concerned with the work of the writer as author and not simply redactor, and since it treats narrative precisely as narrative, the time has come to apply the narrative-critical approach to Acts 10:1--11:18. This approach explores a different set of questions: What is the story of Peter and Cornelius about? How is the story told? What effect does the story have on the reader and why?
Author: Rush Rehm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317606833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Understanding Greek Tragic Theatre, a revised edition of Greek Tragic Theatre (1992), is intended for those interested in how Greek tragedy works. By analysing the way the plays were performed in fifth-century Athens, Rush Rehm encourages classicists, actors, and directors to approach Greek tragedy by considering its original context. Emphasizing the political nature of tragedy as a theatre of, by, and for the polis, Rehm characterizes Athens as a performance culture, one in which the theatre stood alongside other public forums as a place to confront matters of import and moment. In treating the various social, religious and practical aspects of tragic production, he shows how these elements promoted a vision of the theatre as integral to the life of the city – a theatre whose focus was on the audience. The second half of the book examines four exemplary plays, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Ion. Without ignoring the scholarly tradition, Rehm focuses on how each tragedy unfolds in performance, generating different relationships between the characters (and chorus) on stage and the audience in the theatre.
Author: Antonis Petrides
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152755158X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
PIERIDES II, Series Editors: Philip Hardie and Stratis Kyriakidis The re-emergence of Menander from the landfills of Egypt in the late-19th century and the subsequent discovery of the Bodmer Codex in the 1950s caused a sensation among scholars. After a period in which the primary editing and reconstruction of the substantially preserved plays and fragments was the main line of criticism, scholars were finally in a position to take a deep breath and look at Menander and New Comedy, both Greek and Roman, in wider contexts of interpretation and with fresh perspectives drawn from innovative work both in Classical and more modern studies. This book aims to showcase these new approaches to postclassical comedy. The individual contributions, six in total, approach New Comedy as theatrical performance, but also as a dynamic player in the socio-political discourses of the polis culture that gave birth to it. The chapters highlight continuities as well as discontinuities with the cultural and literary past of Athens and the Greek world, but mostly emphasise the progressiveness of New Comedy as a genre and its importance for the nascent culture of Hellenism and Rome thereafter. Blume’s introductory chapter tells the story of Menander’s re-emergence from the tenebrae in full detail. The other five chapters are dual in nature: expositional of a method, but also practical examples of it. They are arranged in a fashion which underlines the major theoretical underpinnings of New Comedy studies, as they are being developed in the present: Cultural Studies (David Konstan and Susan Lape), Intertextuality and Performance (Antonis K. Petrides and Rosanna Omitowoju), and Reception in Rome (Sophia Papaioannou).
