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Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel

Stefan Tilg

No issue in scholarship on the ancient novel has been discussed as hotly as the origin of the Greek love novel, also known as the ‘ideal’ novel. The present book proposes a new solution to this old ... More

No issue in scholarship on the ancient novel has been discussed as hotly as the origin of the Greek love novel, also known as the ‘ideal’ novel. The present book proposes a new solution to this old problem. It argues that the genre had a personal inventor, Chariton of Aphrodisias, and that he wrote the first love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid‐first century AD. This conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics. A revisitation of the literary‐historical background provides the basis for further analysis: among other things, it considers Chariton's milieu at Aphrodisias (especially the local cult of Aphrodite), the dating of other early novels, and Chariton's potential authorship of the fragmentarily preserved novels Metiochus and Parthenope and Chione. Chariton's status as the inventor of the Greek love novel, suggested by the literary‐historical evidence, finds further support in his poetics. I argue that Narratives about Callirhoe is characterized by an unusual effort of self‐definition, which can be best explained as a consequence of coming to terms with a new form of writing. The book is rounded off by a study of the motif of Rumour in Chariton and its derivation from a surprising model, Virgil's Aeneid. This part also makes a significant contribution to the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.Less

The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations

Carol A Newsom

From the simple and beautiful language of the prose tale, to the verbal fireworks of the dialogue between Job and his friends, to the haunting beauty of the poem on wisdom and the sublime poetics of ... More

From the simple and beautiful language of the prose tale, to the verbal fireworks of the dialogue between Job and his friends, to the haunting beauty of the poem on wisdom and the sublime poetics of the divine speeches, this book provides an intense encounter with the aesthetic resources of Hebrew verbal art. In this brilliant new study, the author illuminates the relation between the aesthetic forms of the book and the claims made by its various characters. Her innovative approach makes possible a new understanding of the unity of the book of Job; she rejects the dismantling of the book by historical criticism and the flattening of the text that characterizes certain final form readings.Less

The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius

Katharina Volk

This book examines the genre of ancient didactic poetry, focusing in particular on the Latin authors Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Manilius. Greek and Latin literature abounds in didactic poetry — ... More

This book examines the genre of ancient didactic poetry, focusing in particular on the Latin authors Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Manilius. Greek and Latin literature abounds in didactic poetry — poems that undertake to teach a field of knowledge or practical skill — but already, the ancients found it difficult to gain a theoretical understanding of this genre, and modern readers often perceive didactic texts as dry and overly technical. The book proposes a new theoretical approach to this elusive poetic type, identifying the following four defining criteria for didactic poetry: poetic intent, teacher-student constellation, poetic self-consciousness, and poetic simultaneity. In addition to an historical survey of the genre from Hesiod to the Roman Republic, the work contains individual chapters with detailed interpretations of Lucretius' De rerum natura, Vergil's Georgics, Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, and Manilius' Astronomica. Throughout, special attention is paid to poetics; that is, the ways in which didactic texts explicitly present themselves as poetry and the ideas of poetry that they project. Though often regarded as ‘unpoetic’, didactic poems turn out to be especially rich in reflections on poetics and to comment self-consciously on their own status as both instructional and artistic texts.Less

Texture - A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading

Peter Stockwell

This book represents the latest advances in cognitive poetics. It builds feeling and embodied experience on to the insights into meaningfulness that the cognitive approach to literature has achieved ... More

This book represents the latest advances in cognitive poetics. It builds feeling and embodied experience on to the insights into meaningfulness that the cognitive approach to literature has achieved in recent years. Taking key familiar concepts such as characterisation, tone, empathy, and identification, the book aims to describe the natural experience of literary reading in a thorough and principled way. It draws on stylistics, psycholinguistics, critical theory and neurology to explore the nature of reading verbal art. The aim is a new cognitive aesthetics of literature for its readers.Less

Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form

Michael Golston

Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in ... More

Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought. Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim, and the Language poets; Susan Howe’s “Pierce-Arrow,” which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind American poetry’s postwar avant-garde achievements.Less

Recognition in Mozart's Operas

Jessica Waldoff

Since its beginnings, opera has depended on recognition as a central aspect of both plot and theme. Recognition — or anagnôrisis, Aristotle's term in the Poetics — is a moment of new awareness that ... More

Since its beginnings, opera has depended on recognition as a central aspect of both plot and theme. Recognition — or anagnôrisis, Aristotle's term in the Poetics — is a moment of new awareness that brings about a crucial reversal in the action. Employing both literary and musical analysis, and drawing on critical thought from Aristotle to Terence Cave, this book explores the ways in which the themes of Mozart's operas — clemency, constancy, forgiveness, and other ideals cherished by late 18th-century culture — depend for their dramatization on recognition. Several of the operas culminate in a moment of climactic recognition, many involve the use of disguise, and all include scenes in which characters make significant realizations of identity, feeling, or purpose. Many turn explicitly on themes of knowledge, themes that possess a special resonance in an age that named itself the Enlightenment. A critical understanding of recognition in Mozart's operas reveals the late 18th-century culture of sensibility as an influential but uneasy presence in the age of enlightenment. At the same time, it opens up new ways of thinking about questions of cultural identity, conventions of ending, and the representation of cultural values in these works. Theoretical chapters are devoted to the concepts of recognition and plot; analytical chapters are devoted to Die Zauberflöte, La finta giardiniera, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and La clemenza di Tito. Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, and other works of Mozart and his contemporaries are also considered.Less

Śrīnātha: The Poet who Made Gods and Kings

Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman

This book offers a cultural biography of a south Indian poet—Srinatha, who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the area of today’s Andhra Pradesh and who composed in Telugu, one of the ... More

This book offers a cultural biography of a south Indian poet—Srinatha, who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the area of today’s Andhra Pradesh and who composed in Telugu, one of the great classical languages of India with a literary tradition of a thousand years. Srinatha is arguably the most creative figure in the entire history of Telugu literature and one of the great voices in South Asian literature generally. He revolutionized the nature of literary composition in Telugu and, in effect, invented the classic format of the sustained, well-integrated, thematically coherent Telugu book. He bridged the gap between oral and written composition in Telugu by creating a “second-order” orality; and he combined in highly creative ways the classical Sanskrit world of erudition and poetic precedent with an entirely local, Telugu reality. A figure larger than life, he is emblematic of a moment of profound cultural change and experimentation in south India, and he lives on in a rich tradition of stories and poetic imitations (discussed at length in the final chapter of the book). Defining himself as an “emperor of poets,” he in effect generated a notion of Andhra as a cultural zone as well as a model for the large-scale political empire of Vijayanagara that came into being in the fifteenth century.Less

Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad

Bruce Heiden

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an “oral poem,” it has circulated as a text stabilized in writing since near the time of its composition. Thus, the Iliad undoubtedly has features ... More

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an “oral poem,” it has circulated as a text stabilized in writing since near the time of its composition. Thus, the Iliad undoubtedly has features that render it satisfactory to readers and reading. But the question of what these features might be has been difficult for Homeric scholarship to address within the research paradigm of “oral poetics.” This book delineates a new approach aimed at evaluating what the Iliad furnishes to readers. Its program conceptualizes the act of reading as a repertoire of cognitive functions a reader might deploy in collaboration with the poem's signs. By positing certain functions hypothetically and applying them to the poem, its experiments uncover the kind and degree of suitable “reading material” the poem provides. These analyses reveal that the trajectory of events in the Iliad manifests the central agency of one character, Zeus, and that the transmitted articulation of the epic into “books” conforms to distinct narrative subtrajectories. The analyses also show that the sequence of “books” functions as a design that cues attention to the major crises in the story, as well as to themes that develop its significance. The transmitted arrangement therefore furnishes an implicit cognitive map that both eases comprehension of the storyline and indicates pathways of interpretation.Less

The Henri Meschonnic Reader: A Poetics of Society

Henri Meschonnic

Marko Pajevic (ed.)

Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language ... More

Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence in various fields and its importance is growing. Here, for the first time, some of the key texts are made available in English for a new generation of scholars in the humanities. By introducing key works of Henri Meschonnic, this Reader will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. This book includes fourteen key texts which cover the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for the individual and society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study and philosophy of language, with rich repercussions in fields such as translation studies, poetics and literary studies, and in redefining notions such as rhythm, modernity, the poem and the subject. The Reader is accompanied by introductory texts to Meschonnic, his key concepts and his poetics of society, as well as by a glossary, index and bibliography.Less