Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism
Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism

Author: Nancy Worman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-12-30

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 131639526X

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This study explores a previously uncharted area of ancient literary theory and criticism: the ancient landscapes (such as the Ilissus river in Athens and Mount Helicon) that generate metaphors for distinguishing styles, which dovetail with ancient conceptions of metaphor as itself spatial and mobile. Ancient writers most often coordinate stylistic features with country settings, where authoritative performers such as Muses, poets, and eventually critics or theorists view, appropriate, and emulate their bounties (for example springs, flowers, rivers, paths). These spaces of metaphor and their elaborations provide poets and critics with a vivid means of distinguishing among styles and an influential vocabulary. Together these figurative terrains shape critical and theoretical discussions in Greece and beyond. Since this discourse has a remarkably wide reach, the book is broad in scope, ranging from archaic Greek poetry through Roman oratory and 'Longinus' to the reception of critical imagery in Proust and Derrida.

Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism
Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781316398500

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"This is a book about metaphors of place and spaces of metaphor in ancient literary theory and criticism. It traces the power of figuration to shape, in Shakespeare's famous phrase, "a local habitation and a name" and demonstrates the ways in which rural landscapes emerge in ancient convention as central to literary judgment and theorizing. Writers ranging from archaic poets to rhetorical theorists trace journeys to special places, stage scenes of viewing and appreciating the lay of the land, match inhabitants to their settings, discriminate among landscape features, and by means of imitation and emulation appropriate and reshape famous terrains. They engage in all of this elaborate spatial ordering primarily to delimit styles-first of poetry and later on of prose, predominantly oratory. But their discriminations also spring from and reinforce broader aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, so that their stylistic schemes have a more extensive reach than it may initially appear"--

The Impact of the Roman Empire on Landscapes
The Impact of the Roman Empire on Landscapes

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9004411445

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This volume presents the results of the fourteenth workshop of the international network 'Impact of Empire'. It focuses on the ways in which Rome's dominance influenced, changed, and created landscapes, and examines in which ways (Roman) landscapes were narrated and semantically represented. To assess the impact of Rome on landscapes, some of the twenty contributions in this volume analyse functions and implications of newly created infrastructure. Others focus on the consequences of colonisation processes, settlement structures, regional divisions, and legal qualifications of land. Lastly, some contributions consider written and pictorial representations and their effects. In doing so, the volume offers new insights into the notion of ‘Roman landscapes’ and examines their significance for the functioning of the Roman empire.

Ancient Roman Literary Gardens
Ancient Roman Literary Gardens

Author: K. Sara Myers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0197773206

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"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory
The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory

Author: Ella Haselswerdt

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 1000912175

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New directions in queer theory continue to trouble the boundaries of both queerness and the classical, leading to an explosion of new work in the vast—and increasingly uncharted—intersection between these disciplines, which this interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore. This handbook convenes an international group of experts who work on the classical world and queer theory. The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the start. By placing front and center the rejection of heteronormativity, queer theory has provided Classics with a powerful tool for analyzing non-normative sexual and gender relations in the ancient West, while Classics offers queer theory ancient material (such as literature, visual arts, and social practices) that challenges a wide range of modern normative categories. The collection demonstrates the vitality of this particular moment in queer classical studies, featuring an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Embracing the indeterminacy that lies at the core of queer studies, the essays in this volume are organized not by chronology or genre, but rather by overlapping categories under the following rubrics: queer subjectivities, queer times and places, queer kinships, queer receptions, and ancient pasts/queer futures. The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory offers an invaluable collection for anyone working on queer theory, especially as it applies to premodern periods; it will also be of interest to scholars engaging with the history of sexuality, both in the ancient world and more broadly.

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece
Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece

Author: Jonas Grethlein

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0198848293

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Drawing on cognitive approaches to literary studies, this volume pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative that transcends the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies, deploying concepts such as immersion and embodiment in order to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient Greek narrative and ancient reading habits.

Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity
Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity

Author: Debbie Felton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 135159057X

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Over the last two decades, research in cultural geography and landscape studies has influenced many humanities fields, including Classics, and has increasingly drawn our attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, both geographical and social: how spaces are described by language, what spaces are used for by individuals and communities, and how language, use, and the passage of time invest spaces with meaning. In addition to this ‘spatial’ turn in scholarship, recent years have also seen an ‘emotive’ turn – an increased interest in the study of emotion in literature. Many works on landscape in classical antiquity focus on themes such as the sacred and the pastoral and the emotions such spaces evoke, such as (respectively) feelings of awe or tranquillity in settings both urban and rural. Far less scholarship has been generated by the locus terribilis, the space associated with negative emotions because of the bad things that happen there. In short, the recent ‘emotive’ turn in humanities studies has so far largely neglected several of the more negative emotions, including anxiety, fear, terror, and dread. The papers in this volume focus on those neglected negative emotions, especially dread – and they do so while treating many types of space, including domestic, suburban, rural and virtual, and while covering many genres and authors, including the epic poems of Homer, Greek tragedy, Roman poetry and historiography, medical writing, paradoxography and the short story.

The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception
The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception

Author: Jonas Grethlein

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1009008501

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The concept of mimesis has dominated reflection on the nature and role, in Greek literature, of representation. Jonas Grethlein, in his ambitious new book, takes this reflection a step further. He argues that, beyond mimesis, there was an important but unacknowledged strand of reflection focused instead on the nuanced idea of apatē (often translated into English as 'deceit'), oscillating between notions of 'deception' and 'aesthetic illusion'. Many authors from Gorgias and Plato to Philo, Plutarch and Clement of Alexandria used this key concept to entwine aesthetics with ethics. In creatively exploring the various reconfigurations of apatē, and placing these in their socio-historical contexts, the book offers a bold new history of ancient aesthetics. It also explores the present significance of the aesthetics of deception, unlocking the potential of ancient reflection for current debates on the ethical dimension of representation. It will appeal to scholars in classics and literary theory alike.

Classical Literature and Posthumanism
Classical Literature and Posthumanism

Author: Giulia Maria Chesi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 1350069515

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The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.