Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman's Song

Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman's Song
Anne L. Klinck | 2004-04-17 00:00:00 | Palgrave Macmillan | 208 | Classics
This collection focuses on a woman's point of view in love poetry, and juxtaposes poems by women and poems about women to raise questions about how femininity is constructed. Although most medieval "woman's songs" are either anonymous or male-authored lyrics in a popular style, the term can usefully be expanded to cover poetry composed by women, and poetry that is aristocratic or learned rather than popular. Poetry from ancient Greece and Rome that resonates with the medieval poems is also included here. Readers will find a range of voices, often echoing similar themes, as women rejoice or lament, praise or condemn, plead or curse, speak in jest or in earnest, to men and to each other, about love.


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Divine Talk: Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes (Oxford Classical Monographs)

Divine Talk: Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes (Oxford Classical Monographs)
Gunther Martin | 2009-11-09 00:00:00 | Oxford University Press, USA | 360 | Classics
Gunther Martin examines the references to religion in the speeches of Demosthenes and other Athenian orators in the 4th century BC. In Part I he demonstrates the role religion plays in the rhetorical strategy of speeches in political trials: his main argument is that speakers had to be consistent in their approach to religion throughout their career. It was not possible to change from being a pragmatic to a `religious' speaker and back, but it was possible, when writing for others, to use religion in a way one would not have used it when delivering a speech oneself. In Part II Martin deals with assembly speeches and speeches in private trials, in which religious references are far scarcer. In the assembly, unless genuinely religious matters are discussed, religion seems to have been practically inadmissible, while in private trials it is procedural elements that supply the majority of religious references.

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The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society

The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society
Edith Hall | 2006-12-07 00:00:00 | Oxford University Press, USA | 496 | Classics
In this pioneering study Edith Hall explores the numerous different ways in which we can understand the relationship between the real, social world in which the Athenians lived and the theatrical roles that they invented. In twelve studies of role types and the theatrical conventions that contributed to their creation - including women in childbirth, drowning barbarians, horny satyrs, allegorical representations of Comedy, peasant farmers, tragic masks, and solo sung arias - she advances the argument that the interface between ancient Greek drama and social reality must be understood as a complicated and incessant process of mutual cross-pollination.

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The Tempest (Shakespeare Classics)

The Tempest (Shakespeare Classics)
William Shakespeare | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | Saddleback Educational Publishing, Inc. | 96 | Classics

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Chaucer and the City (Chaucer Studies)

Chaucer and the City (Chaucer Studies)
Ardis Butterfield | 2006-05-18 00:00:00 | D.S.Brewer | 248 | Classics
Literature of the city and the city in literature are topics of major contemporary interest. This volume enhances our understanding of Chaucer's iconic role as a London poet, defining the modern sense of London as a city in history, steeped in its medieval past. Building on recent work by historians on medieval London, as well as modern urban theory, the essays address the centrality of the city in Chaucer's work, and of Chaucer to a literature and a language of the city. Contributors explore the spatial extent of the city, imaginatively and geographically; the diverse and sometimes violent relationships between communities, and the use of language to identify and speak for communities; the worlds of commerce, the aristocracy, law, and public order. A final section considers the longer history and memory of the medieval city beyond the devastations of the Great Fire and into the Victorian period. Dr ARDIS BUTTERFIELD is Reader in English at University College London. Contributors: ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, MARION TURNER, RUTH EVANS, BARBARA NOLAN, CHRISTOPHER CANNON, DEREK PEARSALL, HELEN COOPER, C. DAVID BENSON, ELLIOT KENDALL, JOHN SCATTERGOOD, PAUL DAVIS, HELEN PHILLIPS

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Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real

Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real
Paul Allen Miller | 2003-11-03 00:00:00 | Princeton University Press | 312 | Classics
The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's.

Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, Lacan, and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time.

Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum.
Reviews
Blame:
"Maitre, there seems to be a Symbolic in the Imaginary of my Real," is a sentence that would not be entirely out of place in this book. The wedding of much theory (Jameson, Foucault, Lacan) is consonant with the bounty of citations philosopher Slavoj Zizek receives, seemingly more than any philologist who actually works on Roman elegy. It also seemed that fewer passages of poetry, but more selected words, received discussion than a more comprehensive study might merit, but the author does well to traverse the lifespan of the art and relate its habits to the concerns of the day. There are a couple of textual errors and one of the sources is cited in text without a bibliographical referent.

Praise:
It's always time for someone to discuss the context from which the genre of love elegy emerged. Paul Allen Miller shares his fascination with this poetry that emerged suddenly, sparked, and then disappeared all within a period of fifty years or so. His interpretations and methods of reading elegy are generally smart, though I remain disappointed that some of the uncertainty concerning love elegy finds a kind of analytical resolution in the clarity of psychoanalytic discourse. The chapter on reading the poems of Tibullus is utterly fascinating. The introductory chapter cleanly exhibits the psychoanalytic terminology used throughout in such a way that most of the explanations that use it will be clear to those who don't read Ecrits for kicks. Other chapters provide encounters with Catullus, Propertius, the idea of Gallus, and Ovid.

The complexity of elegy Paul Allen Miller puts on glorious display. The argument that the ideologically split selves of poets in an uncertain age begat poems offering politically prismatic effects seems remotely analogous to Glenn Most's essay elsewhere on the rage for poetic dismemberment during the reign of Nero, in the sense that both authors consider the poets concerned to be keenly aware of the political and cultural trends of the age. The book was invigorating and frustrating for this reader, but on such an exciting topic the many hits may outnumber the misses.

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Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400

Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400
Catherine A.M. Clarke | 2006-09-21 00:00:00 | D.S.Brewer | 172 | Classics
In its exploration of literary representations of ideal landscapes and the production of English identity across Latin and vernacular texts from Bede to Chaucer, this study looks in particular at pastoral and locus amoenus traditions in Medieval English literature, and the early mythologisation of English landscape, space and identity through pastoral topoi. From Bede's Ecclesiastical History and its seminal interpretation of Britain as the delightful island, the study moves through representations of landscape in Old English poetry to the exploitation of the symbolic potential of their local landscapes by regional monastic houses in twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts and pastoral conventions, performances and the idea of the city in the fourteenth century. Introductory and concluding sections form bridges to current scholarship on representations of Englishness through pastoral topoi in the Early Modern period. Dr Catherine A M Clarke lectures in Old and Middle English at University College, Oxford.

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The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1930. (Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature)

The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1930. (Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature)
Andrew Radford | 2007-05-30 00:00:00 | Rodopi | 356 | Classics
The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1940 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers - Mary Webb and Mary Butts - who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts's case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced - and became transformed by - the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades, The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.
Reviews
Until I read this book, I had no idea whatsoever of the significance of the Demeter-Persephone myth in Victorian and Modernist writing. The episode of how Hades abducted Persephone, and how the Earth Goddess Demeter intervened and secured her daughter's release was more than a memorable story: it was, Radford convincingly argues, the contested site of some of the most controversial issues of the time. The classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, for example, used its erotic elements to challenge the sanitised Greek mythology pedalled by her Christian counterparts. In fact, as a story involving the attenuation of male power by female opposition, it became the lightning rod for the battle over women's rights. For the women poets H. D. and Jean Ingelow, Persephone's interminable link to Hades--despite his manifest injustice to her--was a potent metaphor for the onerous burden that marriage was upon women of their generation. For Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb, however, whose novels were investing the English countryside with a proto-Greek luminosity and pathos, Persephone's failure to extricate herself spoke of the impossibility of true emancipation: their heroines, Tess and Hazel, are both crushed by age-old prejudices that define and delimit their very beings. A number of the leading classicists were gay and their subversive tendencies too are given expression through Radford's scrutiny of Forster's creative reworking of the myth in "The Longest Journey", which foregrounds same sex longing and passion. Radford's close and sensitive readings across a formidable range of works suggest that it would be too simplistic to characterise these writings as a form of counter-cultural resistance against a conservative Christian order. Liberal writers wrote against other liberal writers. Forster's privileging of male-to-male relations, for example, came at the expense of the status of middle-class suburban women. As for D. H. Lawrence, he reacted against Hardy's pessimism by featuring a Persephone-like figure in "The Lost Girl" who was in every sense the authoress of her destiny. Liberal writers too may display proclivities that are alarmingly illiberal. Radford's final chapter focuses on Mary Butts, whose uncompromising visions of rural England foreshadow as much of the developing Green consciousness as it smacks of provincialism and xenophobia. Her 'versions of Persephone are compelled to safeguard bloodlines and a sacred topography against a host of contaminating "foreign" influences' (p. 283), which in "Armed with Madness" and the "Death of Felicity Taverner" include homosexuals, blacks and Jews. Radford's painstaking, perspicuous elucidation of the Demeter-Persephone myth is a tour de force examination of the anxieties and contradictions underpinning a distinctively modernist English consciousness.

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Das Haus mit den sieben Giebeln

Das Haus mit den sieben Giebeln
Nathaniel Hawthorne | 2004-03-31 00:00:00 | Manesse Verlag | 512 | Classics

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