This book pays critical homage to the eminent comparatist of Chinese and Western literature and religion, Anthony C. Yu of The University of Chicago. Broadly comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary in scope, the volume consists of an introductory essay on Yu's scholarly career, and thirteen additional essays on topics such as literary texts and traditions of varying provenance and periods, ranging from ancient Greece, medieval Europe, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, to China from the classical to modern periods. The disciplines and areas of research that the essays draw into constructive engagement with one another include comparative literature, religion and literature, history of religions, (or comparative religion), religion and social thought, and the study of myth. Eric Ziolkowski is Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College.

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies presents discussions by leading experts on all significant aspects of this diverse and fast-growing field. Byzantine Studies deals with the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Late Roman Empire, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Its centre was the city formerly known as Byzantium, refounded as Constantinople in 324 CE, the present-day Istanbul. Under its emperors, patriarchs, and all-pervasive bureaucracy Byzantium developed a distinctive society: Greek in language, Roman in legal system, and Christian in religion. Byzantium's impact in the European Middle Ages is hard to over-estimate, as a bulwark against invaders, as a meeting-point for trade from Asia and the Mediterranean, as a guardian of the classical literary and artistic heritage, and as a creator of its own magnificent artistic style.

A series of innovative studies in the textual and literary criticism of Latin literature and their mutually supportive relationship.

"Was Ibsen influenced by Greek culture? Were allusions to the Greeks configured in the Norwegian playwright's works? According to author Norman Rhodes, whether consciously or unconsciously, many of Ibsen's plays are encoded with veiled references to ancient Greek culture. Rhodes also postulates that Ibsen's perception of the importance of the Greeks was most likely mediated to him through German Romanticism and Scandinavian culture." "According to Rhodes, numerous echoes of Greek literature resonate in such early Ibsen plays as Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljerkrans, and Love's Comedy. Ibsen's Brand and Peer Gynt are a dialectic pair which in key ways are suggestive of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, A Doll House has important parallels with Sophocles' Antigone, and An Enemy of the People correlates with both Plato's Apology and Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. Moreover, a Euripidean sense of fatal irrationality seems inscribed in Ibsen's final plays: the protagonists John Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, Master Builder Solness, John Gabriel Borkman, and the sculptor Rubek all destroy themselves."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Homer the Preclassic considers the development of the Homeric poems-in particular the Iliad and Odyssey-during the time when they were still part of the oral tradition. Gregory Nagy traces the evolution of rival “Homers” and the different versions of Homeric poetry in this pretextual period, reconstructed over a time frame extending back from the sixth century BCE to the Bronze Age. Accurate in their linguistic detail and surprising in their implications, Nagy's insights conjure the Greeks' nostalgia for the imagined “epic space” of Troy and for the resonances and distortions this mythic past provided to the various Greek constituencies for whom the Homeric poems were so central and definitive.

A Companion to Sophocles presents the first comprehensive collection of essays in decades to address all aspects of the life, works, and critical reception of Sophocles. First collection of its kind to provide introductory essays to the fragments of his lost plays and to the remaining fragments of one satyr-play, the Ichneutae, in addition to each of his extant tragedies Features new essays on Sophoclean drama that go well beyond the current state of scholarship on Sophocles Presents readings that historicize Sophocles in relation to the social, cultural, and intellectual world of fifth century Athens Seeks to place later interpretations and adaptations of Sophocles in their historical context Includes essays dedicated to issues of gender and sexuality; significant moments in the history of interpreting Sophocles; and reception of Sophocles by both ancient and modern playwrights

Constantine XI’s last moments in life, as he stood before the walls of Constantinople in 1453, have bestowed a heroic status on him. This book produces a more balanced portrait of an intriguing individual: the last emperor of Constantinople. To be sure, the last of the Greek Caesars was a fascinating figure, not so much because he was a great statesman, as he was not, and not because of his military prowess, as he was neither a notable tactician nor a soldier of exceptional merit. This monarch may have formulated grandiose plans but his hopes and ambitions were ultimately doomed, because he failed to inspire his own subjects, who did not rally to his cause. Constantine lacked the skills to create, restore, or maintain harmony in his troubled realm. In addition, he was ineffective on the diplomatic front, as he proved unable to stimulate Latin Christendom to mount an expedition and come to the aid of south-eastern Orthodox Europe. Yet in sharp contrast to his numerous shortcomings, his military defeats, and the various disappointments during his reign, posterity still fondly remembers the last Constantine.

Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation explores how the enigmatic Phaeacian queen, Arete, is at the heart of an epic-scale "poetics of interrogation" used throughout the Odyssey to negotiate Odysseus' kleos, or epic renown. Arete's interrogation of Odysseus has been especially problematic in scholarship, but diachronic and synchronic analysis of similar interrogations across Indo-European, Orphic, and Greek epigrammatic corpora show that the "stranger's interrogation" is a formula that demands performance and negotiation of status. Within the Odyssey, this interrogation is part of an intraformular network used to generate kleos, and the queen's question initiates the longest and most complex negotiation of Odysseus' status in epic and memory. Arete's role as interrogator not only explains her strange authority and resonance with both Penelope and comparative afterlife figures, but it also establishes a gendered, agonistic tension between she and her husband, Alkinoos, that influences the structure, genre, and narratology of performances across the Phaeacian episode. This book reinterprets the Odyssey's central episode and challenges several assumptions about Nausikaa and Alkinoos' famed hospitality, even demonstrating how the Apologue is organized as a response to competing inquiries into Odysseus' fundamental status in tradition. The Odyssey ultimately navigates away from Odysseus' public reputation and roots his status in private memories, and Arete's carefully arranged interventions signal the larger process by which the Odyssey immortalizes Odysseus in poetry as a nostos hero. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the Odyssey.

What did it mean to be Roman after the fall of the western Roman empire in 476, and what were the implications of new formulations of Roman identity for the inhabitants of both east and west? How could an empire be Roman when it was, in fact, at war with Rome? How did these issues motivate and shape historical constructions of Constantinople as the New Rome? And how did the idea that a Roman empire could fall influence political rhetoric in Constantinople? In The Politics of Roman Memory, Marion Kruse visits and revisits these questions to explore the process by which the emperors, historians, jurists, antiquarians, and poets of the eastern Roman empire employed both history and mythologized versions of the same to reimagine themselves not merely as Romans but as the only Romans worthy of the name. The Politics of Roman Memory challenges conventional narratives of the transformation of the classical world, the supremacy of Christian identity in late antiquity, and the low literary merit of writers in this period. Kruse reconstructs a coherent intellectual movement in Constantinople that redefined Romanness in a Constantinopolitan idiom through the manipulation of Roman historical memory. Debates over the historical parameters of Romanness drew the attention of figures as diverse as Zosimos—long dismissed as a cranky pagan outlier, but here rehabilitated—and the emperor Justinian, as well as the major authors of Justinian's reign, such as Prokopios, Ioannes Lydos, and Jordanes. Finally, by examining the narratives embedded in Justinian's laws, Kruse demonstrates the importance of historical memory to the construction of imperial authority.