Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise

Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise
Author: Dimitrios Kanellakis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110677164

The purpose of this book is to examine the variety, the mechanisms, and the poetological intention of the effect of surprise in Aristophanic comedy, addressing the phenomenon not as a self-evident or unselfconscious element of comedy as a genre, but as an elaborate system which characterises the style of the specific dramatist. More precisely, the book analyses Aristophanes’ most prominent verbal, thematic, and theatrical modes of surprise from a typological perspective, and interprets them as comprising the key area in which the playwright claims and demonstrates his artistic superiority over rival genres and individual poets. In line with this purpose, two parallel aims of the book are to provide an original commentary on the passages under examination, and to promote the study of modern performances – a practice which has so far been either restricted to Classical Reception or only theoretically acknowledged (if at all) by mainstream philological scholarship. This is a timely book on a topic of wide current interest across a range of interlocking disciplines: emotion studies, semiotics, narratology, information theory, and -most pertinently for this book- humour research.

Ancient Greek Comedy

Ancient Greek Comedy
Author: Almut Fries
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311064522X

This volume, in honour of Angus M. Bowie, collects seventeen original essays on Greek comedy. Its contributors treat questions of origin, genre and artistic expression, interpret individual plays from different angles (literary, historical, performative) and cover aspects of reception from antiquity to the 20th century. Topics that have not received much attention so far, such as the prehistory of Doric comedy or music in Old Comedy, receive a prominent place. The essays are arranged in three sections: (1) Genre, (2) Texts and Contexts, (3) Reception. Within each section the chapters are as far as possible arranged in chronological order, according to historical time or to the (putative) dates of the plays under discussion. Thus readers will be able to construe their own diachronic and thematic connections, for example between the portrayal of stock characters in early Doric farce and developed Attic New Comedy or between different forms of comic reception in the fourth century BC. The book is intended for professional scholars, graduate and undergraduate students. Its wide range of subjects and approaches will appeal not only to those working on Greek comedy, but to anyone interested in Greek drama and its afterlife.

Lucian’s Laughing Gods

Lucian’s Laughing Gods
Author: Inger NI Kuin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472133349

The first English-language monograph about religion and Lucian of Samosata

FrC 25.2 Diphilos frr. 59-85

FrC 25.2 Diphilos frr. 59-85
Author: Ioanna Karamanou
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2024-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3911065019

This volume forms the second part of the three-volume commentary on the fragments of Diphilus, who belongs to the prominent triad of the poets of New Comedy alongside Menander and Philemon. The present volume comprises the text and an English translation of the fragments of twenty-two plays of Diphilus, followed by a full-scale (philological, thematic, literary, interpretative, historical) commentary that also yields insight into the reception of Diphilan comedy in Roman theatre. This in-depth study of the Diphilan techniques of verbal humour and performance aims at shedding light on the dramatist's distinctive place in the comic tradition, as well as showcasing a degree of variation in the overall image of the production of new comedy.

Image, Text, Stone

Image, Text, Stone
Author: Nikolaus Dietrich
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2022-07-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 311077576X

This edited volume explores the intermediality of image and text in Graeco-Roman sculpture. Through its choice of authors, disciplinary backgrounds are deliberately merged in order to bridge the traditional gap between archaeologists, epigraphists and philologists, who for a long time studied statues, material inscriptions and literary epigrams within the closely confined borders of their individual disciplines. Through its choice of objects, privileging works of which there are significant material remains, through its inclusion of all kinds of figural-cum-inscriptional designs, ranging from grand sculpture to reliefs and ‘decorative’ marble-objects, and through its methodological emphasis on ‘close viewing’ (and reading!) of individual objects, this volume focuses on the materiality of both sculpture and inscription. This perspective is enriched by two comparative chapters on inscribing Greek vases and Roman walls (graffiti). The intermediality of image and inscription is envisaged from various thematic angles, including the intricacies of combining image and epigram (both materially and in literary projection), the original production and reception of inscribed sculpture in its ‘long life’, the viewing and ‘reading’ of sculpture in a space of movement, the issue of (re-)naming statues, and the image and inscription in its social and gender-historical context.

Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition

Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition
Author: Zachary P. Biles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2011-01-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139494724

Athenian comic drama was written for performance at festivals honouring the god Dionysos. Through dramatic action and open discourse, poets sought to engage their rivals and impress the audience, all in an effort to obtain victory in the competitions. This book uses that competitive performance context as an interpretive framework within which to understand the thematic interests shaping the plots and poetic quality of Aristophanes' plays in particular, and of Old Comedy in general. Studying five individual plays from the Aristophanic corpus as well as fragments of other comic poets, it reveals the competitive poetics distinctive to each. It also traces thematic connections with other poetic traditions, especially epic, lyric, and tragedy, and thereby seeks to place competitive poetics within broader trends in Greek literature.

Aristophanic Humour

Aristophanic Humour
Author: Peter Swallow
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2020-06-11
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350101532

This volume sets out to discuss a crucial question for ancient comedy – what makes Aristophanes funny? Too often Aristophanes' humour is taken for granted as merely a tool for the delivery of political and social commentary. But Greek Old Comedy was above all else designed to amuse people, to win the dramatic competition by making the audience laugh the hardest. Any discussion of Aristophanes therefore needs to take into account the ways in which his humour actually works. This question is addressed in two ways. The first half of the volume offers an in-depth discussion of humour theory – a field heretofore largely overlooked by classicists and Aristophanists – examining various theoretical models within the specific context of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays. In the second half, contributors explore Aristophanic humour more practically, examining how specific linguistic techniques and performative choices affect the reception of humour, and exploring the range of subjects Aristophanes tackles as vectors for his comedy. A focus on performance shapes the narrative, since humour lives or dies on the stage – it is never wholly comprehensible on the page alone.

Synchrony and Diachrony of Ancient Greek

Synchrony and Diachrony of Ancient Greek
Author: Georgios K. Giannakis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110719193

This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.

The Poetics of Aristotle

The Poetics of Aristotle
Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781544217574

In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."