Download or read book Imaginary Greece written by R. G. A. Buxton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-06-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of Greek mythology in relation to its original contexts. Part one deals with the contexts in which myths were narrated: the home, public festivals, the lesche. Part two, the heart of the book, examines the relation between the realities of Greek life and the fantasies of mythology: the landscape, the family and religion are taken as case-studies. Part three focuses on the function of myth-telling, both as seen by the Greeks themselves and as perceived by later observers. The author sees his role as that of a cultural historian trying to recover the contexts and horizons of expectation which simultaneously make possible and limit meaning. He seeks to demonstrate how the seemingly endless variations of Greek mythology are a product of a particular community, situated in a particular landscape, and with these particular institutions.
Download or read book Europe written by P. J. A. N. Rietbergen and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major contribution to the idea of Europe sweeps the continent from its Celtic and German origins through the influence of the Greeks and Romans to the fruitful--and sometimes bloody--contacts with other cultures. Peter Rietbergen portrays Europe's history as a series of four grand phases of continuity and change set in the context of political, social and economic developments. These phases are new forms of: surviving; believing; looking at man and the world; and consumption and communication. Rietbergen's descriptions are supported by a selection of illuminating excerpts such as: Chaucer's description of London in 1378; Michelangelo on Italian art; and popular music lyrics of Iron Maiden and Sting.
Download or read book Popular Tyranny written by Kathryn A. Morgan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of authority and rulership was a central concern in ancient Greece, where the figure of the king or tyrant and the sovereignty associated with him remained a powerful focus of political and philosophical debate even as Classical Athens developed the world's first democracy. This collection of essays examines the extraordinary role that the concept of tyranny played in the cultural and political imagination of Archaic and Classical Greece through the interdisciplinary perspectives provided by internationally known archaeologists, literary critics, and historians. The book ranges historically from the Bronze and early Iron Age to the political theorists and commentators of the middle of the fourth century B.C. and generically across tragedy, comedy, historiography, and philosophy. While offering individual and sometimes differing perspectives, the essays tackle several common themes: the construction of authority and of constitutional models, the importance of religion and ritual, the crucial role of wealth, and the autonomy of the individual. Moreover, the essays with an Athenian focus shed new light on the vexed question of whether it was possible for Athenians to think of themselves as tyrannical in any way. As a whole, the collection presents a nuanced survey of how competing ideologies and desires, operating through the complex associations of the image of tyranny, struggled for predominance in ancient cities and their citizens.
Download or read book The Book on the Floor written by WALTER GRASSKAMP and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2016-12-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1954, the French writer, politician, and publisher André Malraux posed at home for a photographer from the magazine Paris Match, surrounded by pages from his forthcoming book Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The enchanting metaphor of the musée imaginaire (imaginary museum) was built upon that illustrated art book, and Malraux was one of its greatest champions. Drawing on a range of contemporary publications, he adopted images and responded to ideas. Indeed, Malraux’s book on the floor is a variation of photographer André Vigneau’s spectacular Encyclopédie photographique de l’art, published in five volumes from 1935 on—years before Malraux would enter this field. Both authors were engaged in juxtaposing artworks via photographs and publishing these photographs by the hundreds, but Malraux was the better sloganeer. Starting from a close examination of the photograph of Malraux in his salon, art historian Walter Grasskamp takes the reader back to the dawn of this genre of illustrated art book. He shows how it catalyzed the practice of comparing works of art on a global scale. He retraces the metaphor to earlier reproduction practices and highlights its ubiquity in contemporary art, ending with an homage to the other pioneer of the “museum without walls,” the unjustly forgotten Vigneau.
Download or read book Imaginal Politics written by Chiara Bottici and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.
Download or read book Her Kind written by Jane Cahill and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 1995-11-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medea betrayed her father and left her homeland for the love of Jason. Then when he abandoned her, she murdered her children. But did she? And what of Clytemnestra, the conniving adulteress? For ten years she plotted the murder of her husband Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and Conqueror of Troy. How would she have told her story? The Greek myths as we know them were told for men by men. Yet they were the culmination of a long oral tradition in which both men and women shared. Using extant ancient literary sources as her guide, including the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Apollodorus, Jane Cahill reconstructs the stories as they might have been told to women by women. These are stories of wronged women, inspired women, determined women, tender women. Medusa tells how it is to know that one look at her face will turn a man to stone, to be hated and feared all the time. Jocasta, Queen of Thebes, confesses her love for the young man who came to save her city from the Sphinx—her son, Oedipus. Each story is accompanied by extensive notes which discuss the ancient sources, explain relevant Greek concepts and customs, and serve as a guide to further reading.
Download or read book The Complete World of Greek Mythology The Complete Series written by Richard Buxton and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2004-06-28 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full, authoritative, and wholly engaging account of these endlessly fascinating tales and of the ancient society in which they were created. Greek myths are among the most complex and influential stories ever told. From the first millennium BC until today, the myths have been repeated in an inexhaustible series of variations and reinterpretations. They can be found in the latest movies and television shows and in software for interactive computer games. This book combines a retelling of Greek myths with a comprehensive account of the world in which they developed—their themes, their relevance to Greek religion and society, and their relationship to the landscape. "Contexts, Sources, Meanings" describes the main literary and artistic sources for Greek myths, and their contexts, such as ritual and theater. "Myths of Origin" includes stories about the beginning of the cosmos, the origins of the gods, the first humans, and the founding of communities. "The Olympians: Power, Honor, Sexuality" examines the activities of all the main divinities. "Heroic exploits" concentrates on the adventures of Perseus, Jason, Herakles, and other heroes. "Family sagas" explores the dramas and catastrophes that befall heroes and heroines. "A Landscape of Myths" sets the stories within the context of the mountains, caves, seas, and rivers of Greece, Crete, Troy, and the Underworld. "Greek Myths after the Greeks" describes the rich tradition of retelling, from the Romans, through the Renaissance, to the twenty-first century. Complemented by lavish illustrations, genealogical tables, box features, and specially commissioned drawings, this will be an essential book for anyone interested in these classic tales and in the world of the ancient Greeks.
Download or read book Europe written by Peter Rietbergen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third, revised and augmented edition of Peter Rietbergen’s highly acclaimed Europe: A Cultural History provides a major and original contribution to the study of Europe. From ancient Babylonian law codes to Pope Urban’s call to crusade in 1095, and from Michelangelo on Italian art in 1538 to Sting’s songs in the late twentieth century, the expressions of the culture that has developed in Europe are diverse and wide-ranging. This exceptional text expertly connects this variety, explaining them to the reader in a thorough and yet highly readable style. Presented chronologically, Europe: A Cultural History examines the many cultural building blocks of Europe, stressing their importance in the formation of the continent’s ever-changing cultural identities. Starting with the beginnings of agricultural society and ending with the mass culture of the early twenty-first century, the book uses literature, art, science, technology and music to examine Europe’s cultural history in terms of continuity and change. Rietbergen looks at how societies developed new ways of surviving, believing, consuming and communicating throughout the period. His book is distinctive in paying particular attention to the ways early Europe has been formed through the impact of a variety of cultures, from Celtic and German to Greek and Roman. The role of Christianity is stressed, but as a contested variable, as are the influences from, for example, Asia in the early modern period and from American culture and Islamic immigrants in more recent times. Since anxieties over Europe's future mount, this third edition text has been thoroughly revised for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moreover, it now also includes a 'dossier' of some seventeen essay-like vignettes that highlight cultural phenomena said to be characteristic of Europe: social solidarity, capitalism, democracy and so forth. With a wide selection of illustrations, maps, excerpts of sources and even lyrics from contemporary songs to support the arguments, this book both serves the general reader as well as students of historical and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Play of Space written by Rush Rehm and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is "space" a thing, a container, an abstraction, a metaphor, or a social construct? This much is certain: space is part and parcel of the theater, of what it is and how it works. In The Play of Space, noted classicist-director Rush Rehm offers a strikingly original approach to the spatial parameters of Greek tragedy as performed in the open-air theater of Dionysus. Emphasizing the interplay between natural place and fictional setting, between the world visible to the audience and that evoked by individual tragedies, Rehm argues for an ecology of the ancient theater, one that "nests" fifth-century theatrical space within other significant social, political, and religious spaces of Athens. Drawing on the work of James J. Gibson, Kurt Lewin, and Michel Foucault, Rehm crosses a range of disciplines--classics, theater studies, cognitive psychology, archaeology and architectural history, cultural studies, and performance theory--to analyze the phenomenology of space and its transformations in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. His discussion of Athenian theatrical and spatial practice challenges the contemporary view that space represents a "text" to be read, or constitutes a site of structural dualities (e.g., outside-inside, public-private, nature-culture). Chapters on specific tragedies explore the spatial dynamics of homecoming ("space for returns"); the opposed constraints of exile ("eremetic space" devoid of normal community); the power of bodies in extremis to transform their theatrical environment ("space and the body"); the portrayal of characters on the margin ("space and the other"); and the tragic interactions of space and temporality ("space, time, and memory"). An appendix surveys pre-Socratic thought on space and motion, related ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and, as pertinent, later views on space developed by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, and Einstein. Eloquently written and with Greek texts deftly translated, this book yields rich new insights into our oldest surviving drama.
Download or read book Cheiron s Way written by Justina Gregory and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the social and ethical formation of youthful characters in Greek epic and tragedy. It investigates Cheiron the Centaur, ancient Greece's first teacher; traces the influential trajectory of the Iliadic Achilles; and offers readings of the Odyssey, Sophocles' Ajax and Philoctetes, and Euripides' Hippolytus and Iphigenia in Aulis.
Download or read book Myths on the Map written by Greta Hawes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polybius boldly declared that 'now that all places have become accessible by land or sea, it is no longer appropriate to use poets and writers of myth as witnesses of the unknown' (4.40.2). And yet, in reality, the significance of myth did not diminish as the borders of the known world expanded. Storytelling was always an inextricable part of how the ancient Greeks understood their environment; mythic maps existed alongside new, more concrete, methods of charting the contours of the earth. Specific landscape features acted as repositories of myth and spurred their retelling; myths, in turn, shaped and gave sense to natural and built environments, and were crucial to the conceptual resonances of places both unknown and known. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars of Greek myth, literature, history, and archaeology to examine the myriad intricate ways in which ancient Greek myth interacted with the physical and conceptual landscapes of antiquity. The diverse range of approaches and topics highlights in particular the plurality and pervasiveness of such interactions. The collection as a whole sheds new light on the central importance of storytelling in Greek conceptions of space.
Download or read book Dream Nation written by Stathis Gourgouris and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.
Download or read book Camera Graeca Photographs Narratives Materialities written by Philip Carabott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While written sources on the history of Greece have been studied extensively, no systematic attempt has been made to examine photography as an important cultural and material process. This is surprising, given that Modern Greece and photography are almost peers: both are cultural products of the 1830s, and both actively converse with modernity. Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities fills this lacuna. It is the first inter-disciplinary volume to examine critically and in a theorised manner the entanglement of Greece with photography. The book argues that photographs and the photographic process as a whole have been instrumental in the reproduction of national imagination, in the consolidation of the nation-building process, and in the generation and dissemination of state propaganda. At the same time, it is argued that the photographic field constitutes a site of memory and counter-memory, where various social actors intervene actively and stake their discursive, material, and practical claims. As such, the volume will be of relevance to scholars and photographers, worldwide. The book is divided into four, tightly integrated parts. The first, ’Imag(in)ing Greece’, shows that the consolidation of Greek national identity constituted a material-cum-representational process, the projection of an imagery, although some photographic production sits uneasily within the national canon, and may even undermine it. The second part, ’Photographic narratives, alternative histories’, demonstrates the narrative function of photographs in diary-keeping and in photobooks. It also examines the constitution of spectatorship through the combination of text and image, and the role of photography as a process of materializing counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. The third part, ’Photographic matter-realities’, foregrounds the role of photography in materializing state propaganda, national memory, and war. The final part, ’Photographic ethnographiesâ
Download or read book Orpheus in Macedonia written by Tomasz Mojsik and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mythological hero Orpheus occupied a central role in ancient Greek culture, but 'the son of Oeagrus' and 'Thracian musician' venerated by the Greeks has also become a prominent figure in a long tradition of classical reception of Greek myth. This book challenges our entrenched idea of Orpheus and demonstrates that in the Classical and Hellenistic periods depictions of his identity and image were not as unequivocal as we tend to believe today. Concentrating on Orpheus' ethnicity and geographical references in ancient sources, Tomasz Mojsik traces the development of, and changes in, the mythological image of the hero in antiquity and sheds new light on contemporary constructions of cultural identity by locating the various versions of the mythical story within their socio-political contexts. Examination of the early literary sources prompts a reconsideration of the tradition which locates the tomb of the hero in Macedonian Pieria, and the volume argues for the emergence of this tradition as a reaction to the allegation of the barbarity and civilizational backwardness of the Macedonians throughout the wider Greek world. These assertions have important implications for Archelaus' Hellenizing policy and his commonly acknowledged sponsorship of the arts, which included his incorporating of the Muses into the cult of Zeus at the Olympia in Dium.
Download or read book Forms of Astonishment written by Richard Buxton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated study of a number of Greek myths about the transformations of humans and gods. Richard Buxton poses the question of how seriously the Greeks took these tales, and in doing so also illuminates issues explored by anthropologists and students of religion.
Download or read book Unwritten Rome written by T. P. Wiseman and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome—as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn’t write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out – like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.
Download or read book Warrior Women written by Deborah Levine Gera and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the very first study devoted to the anonymous "Tractatus de Mulieribus," a remarkable, virtually unknown Greek work, telling of fourteen outstanding ancient women, Greek and barbarian, who were notable for their intelligence, initiative and courage.
