Women and Humor in Classical Greece

Women and Humor in Classical Greece PDF Author: Laurie O'Higgins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822534
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Women and Humor in Classical Greece examines the role of women as producers of joking speech, especially within cults of Demeter. This speech, sometimes known as aischrologia, had considerable weight and vitality within its cultic context. It also shaped literary traditions, notably iambic and Attic old comedy that has traditionally been regarded as entirely male. The misogyny for which ancient iambic is infamous derives in part from an oral world in which women's derisive joking voices reverberated. O'Higgins considers this speech from its mythical origins in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, through the reactive iambic tradition and into old comedy. She also examines the poems of Sappho and Corinna as literary jokers, responding in part to their own experience of joking women. The book concludes with a fresh appraisal of the three great 'women's' plays of Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Thesmophoriasouzae, and Ecclesiazousae.

Women and Humor in Classical Greece

Women and Humor in Classical Greece PDF Author: Laurie O'Higgins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822534
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women and Humor in Classical Greece examines the role of women as producers of joking speech, especially within cults of Demeter. This speech, sometimes known as aischrologia, had considerable weight and vitality within its cultic context. It also shaped literary traditions, notably iambic and Attic old comedy that has traditionally been regarded as entirely male. The misogyny for which ancient iambic is infamous derives in part from an oral world in which women's derisive joking voices reverberated. O'Higgins considers this speech from its mythical origins in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, through the reactive iambic tradition and into old comedy. She also examines the poems of Sappho and Corinna as literary jokers, responding in part to their own experience of joking women. The book concludes with a fresh appraisal of the three great 'women's' plays of Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Thesmophoriasouzae, and Ecclesiazousae.

Lysistrata

Lysistrata PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lysistrata (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description


Women's Life in Greece & Rome

Women's Life in Greece & Rome PDF Author: Mary R. Lefkowitz
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801844751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
This highly acclaimed collection provides a unique look into the public and private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women of all social classes-from wet nurses, prostitutes, and gladiatrixes to poets, musicians, intellectuals, priestesses, and housewives. The third edition adds new texts to sections throughout the book, vividly describing women's sentiments and circumstances through readings on love, bereavement, and friendship, as well as property rights, breast cancer, female circumcision, and women's roles in ancient religions, including Christianity and pagan cults.

The Assembly of Women

The Assembly of Women PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 161592809X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
The women of Athens concoct a daring scheme: penetrate the male-dominated Assembly disguised as men and vote themselves into power, after which they will overturn the old laws and inaugurate a new society where all are equal and where property and sex, too! is shared. This new translation of Aristophanes'' last extant play recaptures the spirit, the bawdiness, and the brilliance of this rollicking farce, which is at the same time a profound critique of contemporary Greek customs and manners.

Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender

Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender PDF Author: A. Foka
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137463651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Throughout history, it has played a crucial role in defining gender roles and identities. This collection offers an in-depth thematic examination of this relationship between humor and gender, spanning a variety of historical and cultural backdrops.

Aristophanes and Women (Routledge Revivals)

Aristophanes and Women (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Lauren K. Taaffe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317700147
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Aristophanes and Women, first published in 1993, investigates the workings of the great Athenian comedian’s ‘women plays’ in an attempt to discern why they were in fact probably quite funny to their original audiences. It is argued that modern students, scholars, and dramatists need to consider much more closely the conditions of the plays’ ancient productions when evaluating their ostensible themes. Three plays are focused upon: Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Ecclesiazusae. All seem to speak quite eloquently to contemporary concerns about women’s rights, the value of women’s work, and the relationships between women and war, literary representation and politics. On the one hand, Professor Taaffe tries to retrieve what an ancient Athenian audience may have l appreciated about these plays and what their central theses may have meant within that culture. On the other hand, Aristophanes is discussed from the perspective of a late twentieth-century, specifically female, reader.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora PDF Author: R. Drew Griffith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780978465223
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Ancient Greece and Rome aren't usually remembered for their sense of humor. However, in reality the ancient Greeks and Romans often refused to take themselves seriously. The authors chronicle the more bizarre activities of the ancient world, venturing out as far as Egypt, Babylon, and Scandinavia, ranging everywhere from moochers to quacks to shrews to perhaps the oldest laundromat joke in history.

Women in Ancient Greece

Women in Ancient Greece PDF Author: Paul Chrystal
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Examines women whose influence was positive, as well as those whose reputations were more notoriousSupremely well researched from many different historical sourcesSuperbly illustrated with photographs and drawings Women in Ancient Greece is a much-needed analysis of how women behaved in Greek society, how they were regarded, and the restrictions imposed on their actions. Given that ancient Greece was very much a man’s world, most books on ancient Greek society tend to focus on men; this book redresses the imbalance by shining the spotlight on that neglected other half. Women had significant roles to play in Greek society and culture – this book illuminates those roles. Women in Ancient Greece asks the controversial question: how far is the assumption that women were secluded and excluded just an illusion? It answers it by exploring the treatment of women in Greek myth and epic; their treatment by playwrights, poets and philosophers; and the actions of liberated women in Minoan Crete, Sparta and the Hellenistic era when some elite women were politically prominent. It covers women in Athens, Sparta and in other city states; describes women writers, philosophers, artists and scientists; it explores love, marriage and adultery, the virtuous and the meretricious; and the roles women played in death and religion. Crucially, the book is people-based, drawing much of its evidence and many of its conclusions from lives lived by historical Greek women.

Immigrant Women in Athens

Immigrant Women in Athens PDF Author: Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317814703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being ‘sexually exploitable.’ Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the ‘citizen wife’ and the ‘common prostitute,’ the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market. This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in Classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.

The Comedian as Critic

The Comedian as Critic PDF Author: Matthew Wright
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780933460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Some of the best evidence for the early development of literary criticism before Plato and Aristotle comes from Athenian Old Comedy. Playwrights such as Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes and others wrote numerous comedies on literary themes, commented on their own poetry and that of their rivals, and played around with ideas and theories from the contemporary intellectual scene. How can we make use of the evidence of comedy? Why were the comic poets so preoccupied with questions of poetics? What criteria emerge from comedy for the evaluation of literature? What do the ancient comedians' jokes say about their own literary tastes and those of their audience? How do different types of readers in antiquity evaluate texts, and what are the similarities and differences between 'popular' and 'professional' literary criticism? Does Greek comedy have anything serious to say about the authors and texts it criticizes? How can the comedians be related to the later literary-critical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle and subsequent writers? This book attempts to answer these questions by examining comedy in its social and intellectual context, and by using approaches from modern literary theory to cast light on the ancient material.