Download or read book Race written by Denise Eileen McCoskey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.
Download or read book Antiquity Recovered written by Victoria C. Gardner Coates and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Antiquity Recovered' presents 13 diverse essays that trace how perceptions of the past have changed over the course of three centuries of excavations. They range in subject from a reassessment of the contents of the library at Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, to the symbolic appearance of the ancient world in classic films.
Download or read book The Art of the Body written by Michael Squire and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The art of the human body is arguably the most important and wide-ranging legacy bequeathed to us by Classical antiquity. Not only has it directed the course of western image-making, it has shaped our collective cultural imaginary - as ideal, antitype, and point of departure. This book is the first concerted attempt to grapple with that legacy: it explores the complex relationship between Graeco-Roman images of the body and subsequent western engagements with them, from the Byzantine icon to Venice Beach (and back again). Instead of approaching his material chronologically, Michael Squire faces up to its inherent modernity. Writing in a lively and accessible style, and supplementing his text with a rich array of pictures, he shows how Graeco-Roman images inhabit our world as if they were our own. The Art of the Body offers a series of comparative and thematic accounts, demonstrating the range of cultural ideas and anxieties that were explored through the figure of the body both in antiquity and in the various cultural landscapes that came afterwards. If we only strip down our aesthetic investment in the corpus of Graeco-Roman imagery, Squire argues, this material can shed light on both ancient and modern thinking. The result is a stimulating process of mutual illumination - and an exhilarating new approach to Classical art history.
Download or read book The Legacy of Antiquity written by Lenia Kouneni and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen an increase of interest in classicism and the reception and survival of antiquity. Classical Reception Studies is a rapidly developing field of research and teaching, and a growing number of new scholars are investigating issues of reception of classical texts, ideas, performance, and material culture across different cultural contexts and in different media. This volume adds new perspectives in this growing field of scholarship. This collection of essays explores the uses of the past from a wide range of perspectives. The papers are drawn from a spectrum of cultures and chronological periods; from medieval to modern times, from Italian to Byzantine, from French to British. The characters involved in each case study accessed the past through different means, employing varying combinations of texts, oral traditions, iconographic representations, and visible remains of the landscape. It is a snapshot of a field in movement, illustrative of current directions and hopeful of producing new ones. The legacy of antiquity is omnipresent, and is as multifaceted as suggested by the wide range of the papers. This volume presents new perspectives, dealing with ever-elusive enigmas and opening the way for future research and investigation to all those who seek to explore the constant fascination with the antique.
Download or read book Gender written by Brooke Holmes and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender has now become a pervasive topic in the humanities and social sciences. Yet despite its familiarity within universities and colleges, some have argued that the radical debates which first characterized gender studies have become ghettoized or marginalized - so that gender no longer makes the impact on creative thinking and ideas that it once did. Brooke Holmes here rescues ancient ideas about sex and gender in order precisely to reinvigorate contemporary debate. She argues that much writing on gender in the classical age fails to place those ancient ideas within their proper historical contexts. As a result, the full transformational force of that thinking is often overlooked. In this short, lively book, the author offers a sophisticated and historically rounded reading of gender in antiquity in order to map out the future of contemporary gender studies. By re-examining ancient notions of sexual difference, bodies, culture, and identity, Holmes shows that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans and others force us to reassess what is at stake in present-day discussions about gender. The ancient world thus offers a vital resource for modern gender theory.
Download or read book Classical Art written by Caroline Vout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as "classical" and as "art"? What does "classical art" mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art's future. What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum. A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.
Download or read book Luck Fate and Fortune written by Esther Eidinow and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. Why and how the ancient Greeks tried to foretell the outcome of the present is the subject of Esther Eidinow's lively appraisal, which explores the legacy of ancient Greek notions of luck, fate and fortune in our own era, drawing on approaches to cognitive anthropology. Perhaps the most famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle at Delphi. But the Delphic Oracle is only the best-known example from a landscape covered by oracular sanctuaries; while across the literary genres of antiquity there are myriad tales - such as that of doomed Oedipus - which wrestle with the cruel vicissitudes of fate and fortune. Exploring some of the key ideas of ancient Greek culture that resonate with modern conceptions of destiny, Eidinow examines the ancients' notion of luck as a means to explain daily experiences. Focusing on writers such as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes, the author shows how concepts of fate in antiquity changed over time, in response to social and political currents.She draws too on modern cultural texts like "Terminator 2" and "Lawrence of Arabia", demonstrating how the recurring questions 'what if?' and 'why me?' are fundamental to the human relationship with an uncertain future, whether it be in the ancient past or the present day.
Download or read book The Classical World written by Nigel Spivey and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterly investigation into the Classical roots of Western civilization, taking the reader on an illuminating journey from Troy, Athens, and Sparta to Utopia, Alexandria, and Rome. An authoritative and accessible study of the foundations, development, and enduring legacy of the cultures of Greece and Rome, centered on ten locations of seminal importance in the development of Classical civilization. Starting with Troy, where history, myth and cosmology fuse to form the origins of Classical civilization, Nigel Spivey explores the contrasting politics of Athens and Sparta, the diffusion of classical ideals across the Mediterranean world, Classical science and philosophy, the eastward export of Greek culture with the conquests of Alexander the Great, the power and spread of the Roman imperium, and the long Byzantine twilight of Antiquity.
Download or read book Antiquity written by Christopher Tadgell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 1257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in a new series of five books describing and illustrating the seminal architectural traditions of the world, Antiquity traces architectural history from its very beginnings until the time when the traditions that shape today’s environments began to flourish. More than a catalogue of buildings, in this work Tadgell provides their political, technological, social and cultural contexts and explores architecture, not only as the development of form and space but as an expression of the civilization within which it evolves. The buildings are analyzed and illustrated with over 1200 colour photographs and 400 drawings while the societies that produced them are brought to life through a broad selection of their artefacts.
Download or read book The Mirror of Antiquity written by Caroline Winterer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome. Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time—the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society—this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.
Download or read book A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity written by Douglas Boin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 PROSE Award finalist in the Classics category! A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity examines the social and cultural landscape of the Late Antique Mediterranean. The text offers a picture of everyday life as it was lived in the spaces around and between two of the most memorable and towering figures of the time—Constantine and Muhammad. The author captures the period using a wide-lens, including Persian material from the mid third century through Umayyad material of the mid eighth century C.E. The book offers a rich picture of Late Antique life that is not just focused on Rome, Constantinople, or Christianity. This important resource uses nuanced terms to talk about complex issues and fills a gap in the literature by surveying major themes such as power, gender, community, cities, politics, law, art and architecture, and literary culture. The book is richly illustrated and filled with maps, lists of rulers and key events. A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity is an essential guide that: Paints a rich picture of daily life in Late Antique that is not simply centered on Rome, Constantinople, or Christianity Balances a thematic approach with rigorous attention to chronology Stresses the need for appreciating both sources and methods in the study of Late Antique history Offers a sophisticated model for investigating daily life and the complexities of individual and group identity in the rapidly changing Mediterranean world Includes useful maps, city plans, timelines, and suggestions for further reading A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity offers an examination of everyday life in the era when adherents of three of the major religions of today—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—faced each other for the first time in the same environment. Learn more about A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity’s link to current social issues in Boin’s article for the History News Network.
Download or read book The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity written by Michael Denis Biddiss and published by Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-disciplinary volume brings together essays illustrating the diversity of forms in which the legacy of Antiquity has been used, and abused, by the Modern West. Here classicists and non-classicists combine to show how historiography, anthropology, philosophy, political thought, archaeology, poetry, drama, the novel, music, architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, and film can be rewardingly juxtaposed as sites rich in the appropriation of Greco-Roman culture. The book has a chronological span running from the 17th to the late-20th century, and it ranges geographically from Britain to Europe and the USA. The authors remind us that it is often not the past itself so much as constructed images thereof which do most to mould our cultural consciousness. The collection discloses the pluralism and flexibility of Antiquity as an important modern symbolic source, and the variety of socio-cultural circumstances which have oriented us towards it. At many points these essays also analyse signs of a certain desire for release from a tradition viewed as troublesome and constraining. Yet they also tend to confirm that, whenever we seek to escape classical culture, we are still likely to be held within its trammels - that, even when we think that we have thrown it off, we seem fated to remain within its protean thrall.
Download or read book A Companion to Global Historical Thought written by Prasenjit Duara and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL THOUGHT A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, directly addressing issues of historiography in a globalized context. Questions concerning the global dissemination of historical writing and the relationship between historiography and other ways of representing the past have become important not only in the academic study of history, but also in public arenas in many countries. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book considers the problem of “the global” – in the multiplicity of traditions of narrating the past; in the global dissemination of modern historical writing; and of “the global” as a concept animating historical imaginations. It explores the different intellectual approaches that have shaped the discipline of history, and the challenges posed by modernity and globalization, while illustrating the shifts in thinking about time and the emergence of historical thought. Complementing A Companion to Western Historical Thought, this book places non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of discussion, helping scholars and students alike make sense of the discipline at the start of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Long Shadow of Antiquity written by Gregory S. Aldrete and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid exploration of the many ways the classical world remains relevant today, this is a passionate justification of why we continue to read about and study the lives and works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Challenging the way the phrase 'That's just ancient history' is used to dismiss something as being irrelevant, Greg and Alicia Aldrete demonstrate just how much ancient Greece and Rome have influenced and shaped our world today in ways both large and small. From the more commonly known influences on politics, law, literature and timekeeping through to the everyday rituals and routines we take for granted when we exercise, dine, marry and dress, we are rooted in the ancient world. Even the political upheaval, celebrity obsession and blurring of public and private boundaries that we see in current news betray ancient characteristics - now brought to the fore here in a new final chapter. If you have ever wondered how far exactly we still walk in the footsteps of the ancients or wanted to understand how study of the classical world can inform and explain our lives today, this is the book for you.
Download or read book Blacks in Antiquity written by Frank M. Snowden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the participation of black Africans, usually referred to as "Ethiopians," by the Greek and Romans, in classical civilization, concluding that they were accepted by pagans and Christians without prejudice.
Download or read book Race written by Denise Eileen McCoskey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.
Download or read book The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity written by Aby Warburg and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.
