Bøker i Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches-serien

This study of the "Odyssey" argues that Athena's wrath is central to both the structure and the theme of the poem. It shows how an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's narrative organisation and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men.

The Classical Moment is a reexamination of the concept of a supreme moment in the literatures of Greece, Mesopotamia, India, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Taking the case of Greece as its starting point, it examines what such "moments" have in common, how they are created, and what effect they have on subsequent literary creation.

These essays examine innovations in both the theory and practice of classical philosophy. The chapters address interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways.

In this landmark collection of essays, renowned classicist Charles Segal offers detailed analyses of major texts from archaic and early classical Greek poetry; in particular, works of Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna. Segal provides close readings of the texts, and then studies the literary form and language of early Greek lyric, the poets'' conception of their aims and their art, the use of mythical paradigms, and the relation of the poems to their social context. A recurrent theme is the recognition of the fragility and brevity of mortal happiness and the consciousness of how the immortality conferred by poetry resists the ever-threatening presence of death and oblivion, fixing in permanent form the passing moments of joy and beauty. This is an essential book for students and scholars of ancient Greek poetry.

An examination of how the major themes of the "Iliad" -Achilleus' "wrath", heroic values such as honour and glory, and human mortality and suffering, to mention the most widely recognized - are connected to each other in a way that reveals the poem's structural coherence and unity.

This study of the construction of intellectual authority examines the impact of Thucydides's "History". It argues that Thucydides's work succeeded for two main reasons: he refined the language of administration, and drew upon the abstract philosophical rhetoric that arose in the 5th century.

This text forms an enquiry into the poetics of authenticity and authority in Sophocles' "Electra". The author reveals "Electra" as a self-referential play about play-writing.

Reconsiders the origins of the Ancient Greeks' ideas and practices concerning their own past. This study demonstrates that hero cult and ancestor cult persisted throughout the Iron Age. Practices such as visiting tombs to make offerings were common.

This text looks at Euripides' "Hippolytus" and offers an examination of the ancient preference for the implicit style, and suugests a possible reading of Euripides' first treatment of the myth which would account for The Athenian audience's reservations about his "Hippoytus Veiled".

In 'The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis', Becker explores how Homeric poetry shapes its own reception: how Homer's reaction to a visual image creates his audience's response to a literary description. Becker also enters into a fiercely raging literary debate about the modernist, self-conscious elements of Homeric narrative.

This study is an interpretation of the choices the tragedians made in regard to certain forms of standardized variations in word order and prosody. Those choices were made in response to the competing demands of metrical constrain and the poets' sense of what was stylistically appropriate for tragic trimeters.

An examination of Sophocles' "Antigone" in the context of its setting in 5th-century Athens. The authors attempt to create an interpretive environment that is true to the issues and interests of 5th-century Athenians, as opposed to those of modern scholars and philosophers.

This study represents a radical rethinking of traditional distinctions involving the term "religion" in the ancient Greek world and beyond, through late antiquity to the 17th century, and promotes the fluidity of such concepts as religion and magic.

In this study, Marian Demos seeks to demonstrate the significance of three famous lyric quotations within their respective contexts in the dialogues of Plato. These passages include the Simonides poem in the "Protagoras" and the misquotation of Pindar in the "Gorgias".

Lowell Edmunds combines two readings of the "Oedipus at Colonus" to arrive at a fresh way of looking at Greek tragedy. He sets forth a semiotic theory of theatrical space and then applies his theory to the visual and spacial dimensions of the "Oedipus at Colonus".

A Penelopean Poetics looks at the relationship between gender ideology and the self-referential poetics of the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope. She is a cunning story-teller; her repeated reweavings of Laertes' shroud a figurative replication of the process of oral poetic composition itself. Penelope's web is thus a discourse and it can be construed specifically as feminine. Her gendered poetics celebrates process, multiplicity, and ambiguity and it resists phallocentric discourse by undermining stable and fixed meanings. Penelope's poetics become a discursive thread through which different feminine voices can realize their resistant capacities. Author Barbara Clayton's work contributes to discussions in the classics as well as literary criticism, sex and gender studies, and women's studies.