This is the record of the pilgrimage of one great artist, reflected in the experience of one small audience. When Sam Peckinpah died in 1984, I spent some time working out my responses to his work as a whole and, more generally, puzzling over the experience of following contemporary artists as their work takes shape. I ended up lamenting Peckinpah’s death, pondering those wonderful movies, and reflecting on what all our watching, reading, and listening amounts to in our living.

Lament seems to have been universal in the ancient world. As such, it is an excellent touchstone for the comparative study of attitudes towards death and the afterlife, human relations to the divine, views of the cosmos, and the constitution of the fabric of society in different times and places. This collection of essays offers the first ever comparative approach to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions of lament. Beginning with the Sumerian and Hittite traditions, the volume moves on to examine Bronze Age iconographic representations of lamentation, Homeric lament, depictions of lament in Greek tragedy and parodic comedy, and finally lament in ancient Rome. The list of contributors includes such noted scholars as Richard Martin, Ian Rutherford, and Alison Keith. Lament comes at a time when the conclusions of the first wave of the study of lament-especially Greek lament-have received widespread acceptance, including the notions that lament is a female genre; that men risked feminization if they lamented; that there were efforts to control female lamentation; and that a lamenting woman was a powerful figure and a threat to the orderly functioning of the male public sphere. Lament revisits these issues by reexamining what kinds of functions the term lament can include, and by expanding the study of lament to other genres of literature, cultures, and periods in the ancient world. The studies included here reflect the variety of critical issues raised over the past 25 years, and as such, provide an overview of the history of critical thinking on the subject.

Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. The author explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England; brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past; and addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were, after the Reformation, increasingly viewed as disturbing.

Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art approaches tradition and transculturality in religious art from an Orthodox perspective that defines tradition as a dynamic field of exchanges and synergies between iconographic types and their variants. Relying on a new ontology of iconographic types, it explores one of the most significant ascetical and eschatological Christian images, the King of Glory (Man of Sorrows). This icon of the dead-living Christ originated in Byzantium, migrated west, and was promoted in the New World by Franciscan and Dominican missions. Themes include tensions between Byzantine and Latin spiritualities of penance and salvation, the participation of the body and gender in deification, and the theological plasticity of the Christian imaginary. Primitivist tendencies in Christian eschatology and modernism place avant-garde interest in New Mexican santos and Greek icons in tradition.

In this groundbreaking inquiry into the poetics of authenticity and authority in Sophocles' Electra, Batchelder looks at Aegisthus and Orestes as rival dramatists, who each use the illusions of the theater in a struggle for control of Mycenae. She demonstrates that the Seal of Orestes-the signet ring of his father-is the recognition token not only for Electra, but also for the entire play, revealing Electra as a self-referential play about play writing.

Lament is essential to human thriving. It allows us to cope with significant loss, an inescapable feature of our mortal existence. Lament is the passionate outpouring of deep sorrow and grief over such loss, which helps us avoid being completely overcome by the strong emotions that come with it. Lament is cathartic and constructive. It is a necessary step in coming to terms with great loss and moving forward in life. Not to lament is not to live--or at least not to live very fully, deeply, or well. This book deals with one instance of Christian lament in the late Reformation by exploring the efforts of a talented yet little-known layman to cope with the death of his beloved wife. For the first time, it provides full access to the remarkable work of private devotion that he authored to express his lament. A work of haunting candor, impressive artistry, and searching faith, The Pious Meditations is an extraordinarily rare and valuable source that has received very little scholarly attention. It furnishes both fresh insight into life in the past and important resources for life in the present. Written in a period that knew no radical separation between the academy and the church, it was informed by the author's experience in both, and can continue to speak to both today.

What kind of allusion is possible in a poetry derived from a centuries-long oral tradition, and what kind of oral-derived poetry are the Homeric epics? Comparison of Homeric epic with South Slavic heroic song has suggested certain types of answers to these questions, yet the South Slavic paradigm is neither straightforward in itself nor necessarily the only pertinent paradigm: Augustan Latin poetry uses many sophisticated and highly self-conscious techniques of allusion which can, this book contends, be suggestively paralleled in Homeric epic, and some of the same techniques of allusion can be found in Near Eastern poetry of the third and second millennia BC. By attending to these various paradigms, this challenging study argues for a new understanding of Homeric allusion and its place in literary history, broaching the question of whether there can have been historical continuity in a poetics of allusion stretching from the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, via the Iliad and Odyssey, to the Aeneid and Metamorphoses, despite the enormous disparities of time and place and of language and culture, including those represented by the cuneiform tablet, the papyrus roll, and by an oral performance culture. The fundamental methodological problems are explored through a series of interlocking case studies, treating of how the Odyssey conceivably alludes to the Iliad and also to earlier poetry on Odysseus' homecoming, the Iliad to earlier poetry on the Ethiopian hero Memnon, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter to earlier poetry on Hades' abduction of Persephone, and early Greek epic to Mesopotamian mythological poetry, pre-eminently the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.

The essays in Modernism and Mourning examine the work of mourning in modernist literature, or more precisely, its propensity for resisting this work. Drawing from recent developments in the theory and cultural history of mourning, its contributors explore the various ways in which modernist writers repudiate Freud's famous injunction to mourners to work through their grief, endorsing instead a resistant, or melancholic mourning that shapes both their themes and their radical experiments with form. The emerging picture of the pervasive influence of melancholic mourning in modernist literature casts new light on longstanding critical arguments, especially those about the politics of modernism. It also makes clear the pertinence of this literature to the present day, in which the catastrophic losses of 9/11, of retaliatory war, of racially motivated genocide, of the AIDS epidemic, have made the work of mourning a subject of widespread interest and debate. Patricia Rae is Head of the Department of English at Queen's University.

Antigone Samellas examines the modes of reception of Jesus' message of salvation. She explores the Greek and Jewish influence on Christian eschatology and traces the Hellenistic roots of Christian consolation philosophy. The author examines Christianity as a 'total therapy of grief' and highlights the differences that existed between the religious cures and the Hellenistic philosophical therapies. To gain a better understanding of the process of conversion to the new faith Antigone Samellas also investigates which aspects of Christianity were appealing and which repugnant in the eyes of pagans and Jews. Finally, she attempts to convey something of the wisdom of the East, in all its cultural and religious nuances, to the modern reader.

The blind mendicant in Ukrainian folk tradition is a little-known social order, but an important one. The singers of Ukrainian epics, these minstrels were organized into professional guilds that set standards for training and performance. Repressed during the Stalin era, this is their story.