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Distinguished international scholars examine the neglected issue of the body and its status in classical antiquity
This book offers the first systematic, up-to-date, cross-cultural, and detailed study of “semi-volitional bodily behaviour” (sneezing, spitting, coughing, burping, vomiting, defecating, etc.) in the classical world. Examining verse and prose texts, fragments, and scholia from the age of Homer to the second century AD, the central argument put forward in this volume is that semi-volitional bodily acts have the potential to betray individual or collective (ethnic/civic and cultural) identities centred on a variety of different themes. Discussions specifically focus on the following five aspects of the interplay between semi-volitional body language and identity construction: sexuality and gender; the link between sexuality and socioeconomic identity of individuals or groups; the embodied markers of civic/ethnic and cultural collectives and the contrast between “we-ness” and “otherness”; ēthos and emotions; and how dietary habits and illnesses indicate the “somo-psychosocial” identity of individuals or groups. The book offers a comprehensive understanding of representations of the human body in ancient Greece and Rome, while reopening the complex and fascinating discussion about the relationship between intention, mind, body, and identity. This book offers a fascinating study suitable for students and scholars of classics and ancient Greek and Roman history. It is also of interest to those in a variety of other disciplines, including body culture studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies, as well as sociology, anthropology, cognitive medicine, and the history of medicine.
In the Graeco-Roman world, the cosmic order was enacted, in part, through bodies. The evaluative divisions between, for example, women and men, humans and animals, “barbarians” and “civilized” people, slaves and free citizens, or mortals and immortals, could all be played out across the terrain of somatic difference, embedded as it was within wider social and cultural matrices. This volume explores these thematics of bodies and boundaries: to examine the ways in which bodies, lived and imagined, were implicated in issues of cosmic order and social organisation in classical antiquity. It focuses on the body in performance (especially in a rhetorical context), the erotic body, the dressed body, pagan and Christian bodies as well as divine bodies and animal bodies. The articles draw on a range of evidence and approaches, cover a broad chronological and geographical span, and explore the ways bodies can transgress and dissolve, as well shore up, or even create, boundaries and hierarchies. This volume shows that boundaries are constantly negotiated, shifted and refigured through the practices and potentialities of embodiment.
A collection of ground-breaking and scholarly papers on Latin literature by a number of distinguished classicists, produced in memory of Don Fowler, who died in 1999 at the age of 46. The essays are concerned with the reception of the classical world, extending into the realms of modern philosophy, art history, and cultural studies.
A vision of reality in which a pre-eminent human type was defined in opposition to non-ideal 'Others' characterized ancient Greece. In democratic Athens the social structure privileged male citizens, and women, resident aliens, and slaves were marginalized. The Persian Wars polarized the opposition of Greeks and Barbarians. This anthology provides the first investigation of the delineation of otherness across a broad spectrum of the imagery of Greek art. An international cast of authors, with methodologies ranging from traditional to avant-garde, examines manifestations of the Other in Late Archaic and Classical Greek representations that particularly interest them. The 17 chapters develop a nuanced picture of the visual criteria that denoted otherness in regard to gender, class, and ethnicity and also reveal the social and political functions of this remarkable Greek imagery. Also available in paperback (ISBN 9789004117129)
Gender and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture offers incisive analysis of selected works of ancient art through a critical use of cutting-edge theory from gender studies, body studies, art history and other related fields. The book raises important questions about ancient sculpture and the contrasting responses that the individual works can be shown to evoke. Rosemary Barrow gives close attention to both original context and modern experience, while directly addressing the question of continuity in gender and body issues from antiquity to the early modern period through a discussion of the sculpture of Bernini. Accessible and fully illustrated, her book features new translations of ancient sources and a glossary of Greek and Latin terms. It will be an invaluable resource and focus for debate for a wide range of readers interested in ancient art, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and art history and gender and body studies more broadly.
This is the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century. By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, this book reconstructs the social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this volume synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society. Intended to be accessible to nonspecialists as well as classicists, and students as well as academic professionals, this book will find a wide audience.
How did Roman poets create character? The mythological figures that dot the landscape of Roman poetry entail their own predetermined plotlines and received characteristics: the idea of a gentle, maternal Medea is as absurd as a spineless and weak Achilles. For Roman poets, the problem is even more acute since they follow on late in a highly developed literary tradition. The fictional characters that populate Roman literature, such as Aeneas and Oedipus, link text and reader in a form of communication that is strikingly different from a first person narrator to an addressee. With Exemplary Traits, Mira Seo addresses this often overlooked question. Her study offers an examination of how Roman poets used models dynamically to create character, and how their referential approach to character reveals them mobilizing the literary tradition. Close readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca, and Statius offer a more nuanced discussion of the expectations of both authors and audiences in the Roman world than those currently available in scholarly debate. By tracing the philosophical and rhetorical concepts that underlie the function of characterization, Exemplary Traits allows for a timely reconsideration of it as a fruitful literary technique.
Since the golden era of silent movies, stars have been described as screen gods, goddesses and idols. This is the story of how Olympus moved to Hollywood to divinise stars as Apollos and Venuses for the modern age, and defined a model of stardom that is still with us today.
The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres. These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the first section discuss “mapping the world in the novels.” The second part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.