This volume evaluates a single element of tragic art, namely the way in which narrative descriptions of place participate in the poetry of tragedy. They join together structures of the theater to create a context for tragic performance, and ultimately reflect upon tragedy's connection to earlier narrative forms and to the traditional tales that regularly supply tragic plots. The first part of this book examines the introductory function of spatial descriptions and the peculiar resources offered to the playwright by cult settings. In the second part, the spatial oppositions, that are inherent structuring devices in traditional tales, are taken up in chapters treating the motif of exile in extant tragedy.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.

Surveys the complex landscape of Hesiodic reception in lyric poetry and drama in the fifth century BCE.

From Homer to Hollywood, the western storytelling tradition has canonised a distinctive set of narrative values characterised by tight economy and closure. This book traces the formation of that classical paradigm in the development of ancient storytelling from Homer to Heliodorus. To tell this story, the book sets out to rehabilitate the idea of 'plot', notoriously disconnected from any recognised system of terminology in literary theory. The first part of the book draws on developments in narratology and cognitive science to propose a way of formally describing the way stories are structured and understood. This model is then used to write a history of the emergence of the classical plot type in the four ancient genres that shaped it - Homeric epic, fifth-century tragedy, New Comedy, and the Greek novel - with insights into the fundamental narrative poetics of each.

Language in Literature examines the overlap and blurring boundaries of English, comparative and world poetry and literature. Questions of language, literature, translation and creative writing are addressed as befitting an author who is a poet, literary scholar and historian. The book begins with metaphor, which Aristotle thought, in Poetics, was the key gift of the poet, and discusses it in theory and practice; it moves from the identity of metaphor to identity in translation and culture; it examines poetry in a comparative and world context; it looks at image and text; it explores literature and culture in the Cold War; it explores the role of the poet and scholar in translating poetry East and West; it places creative writing in theory and practice in context East and West; it concludes by summing up and suggesting implications of creation in language, translating and interpreting, and its expression in literature, especially in poetry.

This is the first substantial commentary on Lucian's Verae Historiae ("True Histories"), a fantastic journey narrative considered the earliest surviving example of Science Fiction in the Western tradition. The Introduction situates the work in the context of Lucian's oeuvre, especially his preoccupation with distinguishing truth from fiction and exposing the lies of philosophers. In their commentary, the editors trace the sources and the meaning of the numerous intertextual allusions and parodies of philosophers, poets, historians and paradoxographers. The Verae Historiae emerges from this scrutiny as a remarkably complex text with some very "modern" concerns: it problematizes the act of reading, allegorical interpretation, authorial reliability, and the validity of cultural norms and literary genres.

This is the first in a series of volumes which together will provide an entirely new history of ancient Greek (narrative) literature. Its organization is formal rather than biographical. It traces the history of central narrative devices, such as the narrator and his narratees, time, focalization, characterization, description, speech, and plot. It offers not only analyses of the handling of such a device by individual authors, but also a larger historical perspective on the manner in which it changes over time and is put to different uses by different authors in different genres. The first volume lays the foundation for all volumes to come, discussing the definition and boundaries of narrative, and the roles of its producer, the narrator, and recipient, the narratees.