Author: B. C. McGing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
The genre of biography in the ancient world is interestingly diverse and permeable and deserves intensive study, bearing as it does on ideas of characterization and the individual. This volume considers both the form and the content of biography across the ancient world, and is particularly interested in the frontiers with other related genres, such as history. The papers range from the Old Testament to the Arab world, from the New Testament to the Lives of Saints, from the classic Greek and Roman biographers to less well known practitioners of the art.
Author: Koen De Temmerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316598500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Ancient biography is now a well-established and popular field of study among classicists as well as many scholars of literature and history more generally. In particular biographies offer important insights into the dynamics underlying ancient performance of the self and social behaviour, issues currently of crucial importance in classical studies. They also raise complex issues of narrativity and fictionalization. This volume examines a range of ancient texts which are or purport to be biographical and explores how formal narrative categories such as time, space and character are constructed and how they address (highlight, question, thematize, underscore or problematize) the borderline between historicity and fictionality. In doing so, it makes a major contribution not only to the study of ancient biographical writing but also to broader narratological approaches to ancient texts.
Author: Diskin Clay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192665421
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Lucian of Samosata's True History is a fantastical tale of voyage and imagination. No editor, translator, or reader knows quite how to describe it or fit it comfortably into a familiar genre of Greek literature: 'satires' and 'dialogues' only partially describe the genre or genres he wrote in. Of all the ancient Greco-Roman writers, Lucian is without doubt one of the most inventive and witty. The Greek text in this edition of the True History is accompanied by a facing page English translation, making it an accessible and informative resource aimed at students and teachers of Greek. Whether used in the classroom or in research, readers will benefit from an introduction to Lucian and his place in imperial Greek literature, as well as a translation and commentary that bring out the wonders of his True History.
Author: Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110791919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
This volume unites scholars of classical epigraphy, papyrology, and literature to analyze the documentary habit in the Roman Empire. Texts like inscriptions and letters have gained importance in classical scholarship, but there has been limited analysis of the imaginative and sociological dimensions of the ancient document. Individual chapters investigate the definition of the document in ancient thought, and how modern understandings of documentation may (mis)shape scholarly approaches to documentary sources in antiquity. Contributors reexamine familiar categories of ancient documents through the lenses of perception and function, and reveal where the modern understanding of the document departs from ancient conceptions of documentation. The boundary between literary genres and documentary genres of writing appears more fluid than prior scholarship had allowed. Compared to modern audiences, inhabitants of the Roman Empire used a more diverse range of both non-textual and textual forms of documentation, and they did so with a more active, questioning attitude. The interdisciplinary approach to the "mentality" of documentation in this volume advances beyond standard discussions of form, genre, and style to revisit the document through the eyes of Greco-Roman readers and viewers.
Author: Jason König
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472521315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
In this book Jason Konig offers for the first time an accessible yet comprehensive account of the multi-faceted Greek literature of the Roman Empire, focusing especially on the first three centuries AD. He covers in turn the Greek novels of this period, the satirical writing of Lucian, rhetoric, philosophy, scientific and miscellanistic writing, geography and history, biography and poetry, providing a vivid introduction to key texts, with extensive quotation in translation. The challenges and pleasures these texts offer to their readers have come to be newly appreciated in the classical scholarship of the last two or three decades. In addition there has been renewed interest in the role played by novelistic and rhetorical writing in the Greek culture of the Roman Empire more broadly, and in the many different ways in which these texts respond to the world around them. This volume offers a broad introduction to those exciting developments.
Author: József Zsengellér
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900427118X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Rewritten Bible After Fifty Years presents the papers of a conference on the meanings and usages of the term Rewritten Bible introduced by Geza Vermes in 1961. Leading scholars of the topic discuss their new insights and ideas comparing with Vermes' initiative, whose participation on this conference was unfortunately the last chance for a life dialogue with him on this topic. Apart from the terminological discussions and comparisions several case studies widen the scope of the notion of Rewritten Bible/Scripture and rewriting as a genre and technique.
Author: Frederick E Brenk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004348778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
The present book Frederick E. Brenk: Plutarch, Religious Thinker and Biographer, “The Religious Spirit of Plutarch of Chaironeia” and “The Life of Mark Antony” includes the updated and revised version of two seminal articles on Plutarch by F. E. Brenk published thirty years ago in ANRW. Edited by Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, both articles cover the two sides of Plutarch’s corpus, the Lives and Moralia.
Author: Chrysanthos S. Chrysanthou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429648839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
This volume addresses the important literary phenomenon of ‘generic enrichment’ in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. It examines the ways in which features of other genres are deployed and incorporated in Plutarch’s biographies and the effects of this on the texts themselves and readers’ responses to them. ‘Generic enrichment’, a term coined by Stephen Harrison with reference to Latin poetry, is used here to refer to the different ways in which a text of one genre might incorporate or evoke features of other genres. The fact that particular Plutarchan biographies may contain not only allusions to specific texts from a variety of genres, but also features such as vocabulary, phraseology, and plot-forms which evoke other genres, has been noticed sporadically by scholars. However, this is the first volume to discuss this feature as a distinct phenomenon across the corpus of Parallel Lives and to attempt an assessment of its effect. Chapters cover the interaction of Plutarchan biography with a series of genres, including archaic poetry, comedy, tragedy, historiography, philosophy, geographical and scientific texts, oratory, inscriptions, novelistic writing and periegetical works. Together these studies demonstrate the generic complexity and richness of Plutarch’s Lives, enhance our understanding of ancient biography in general and Plutarchan biography in particular, and explore the range of effects such generic enrichment might have on readers. Generic Enrichment in Plutarch’s Lives is of interest to students and scholars of Plutarch and ancient biography, as well as to those working in other periods and genres of both Latin and Greek literature, and to those beyond the field of Classical Studies who are interested in questions of genre and literary theory.
Author: S. Rex Stem
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472028480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
The Roman writer Cornelius Nepos was a friend of Cicero and Catullus and other first-century BCE authors, and portions of his encyclopedic work On Famous Men are the earliest surviving biographies written in Latin. In The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos, Rex Stem presents Nepos as a valuable witness to the late Republican era, whose biographies share the exemplary republican political perspective of his contemporaries Cicero and Livy. Stem argues that Nepos created the genre of grouped political biographies in order to characterize renowned Mediterranean figures as role models for Roman leaders, and he shows how Nepos invested his biographies with moral and political arguments against tyranny. This book, the first to regard Nepos as a serious thinker in his own right, also functions as a general introduction to Nepos, placing him in his cultural context. Stem examines Nepos' contributions to the growth of biography, and he defends Nepos from his critics at the same time that he lays out the political significance and literary innovation of Nepos' writings. Accessible to advanced undergraduates, this volume is addressed to a general audience of classicists and ancient historians, as well as those broadly interested in biography, historiography, and political thought.
Author: Peter Turner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317006100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Were holy men historical figures or figments of the theological imagination? Did the biographies devoted to them reflect facts or only the ideological commitments of their authors? For decades, scholars of late antiquity have wrestled with these questions when analysing such issues as the Christianization of Europe, the decline of paganism, and the 'rise of the holy man' and of the hagiographical genre. In this book Peter Turner suggests a new approach to these problems through an examination of a wide range of spiritual narrative texts from the third to the sixth centuries A.D.: pagan philosophical biographies, Greek and Latin Christian saints' lives, and autobiographical works by authors such as Julian and Augustine. Rather than scrutinizing these works for either historical facts or religious and intellectual attitudes, he argues that a deeper historicity can be found only in the interplay between these types of information. On the textual level, this analysis recognises the genuine commitment of spiritual authors to write truthfully and to record realistically a world felt to be replete with spiritual and symbolic meaning. On the historical level, it argues that holy men, expecting the same symbolism within their own lives, adopted lifestyles which ultimately provoked and confirmed this world view. Such praxis is detectable not only in the holy men who inspired biography but also in the period's scattered autobiographical writings. As much a historical as a textual phenomenon, this spiritually-minded scrutiny of the world created interpretations which were always open and contested. Therefore, this book also associates spiritual narrative texts with only one possible voice of religious experience in a constant dialogue between believers, opponents, and the sceptical undecided.
