Examining Malory's political language, this study offers a revisionary view of Arthur's kingship in the Morte Darthur and the role of the Round Table fellowship. Considering a range of historical and political sources, Lexton suggests that Malory used a specific lexicon to engage with contemporary problems of kingship and rule.

A detailed examination of Proverbs 1-9, an early Jewish poetic work. Stuart Weeks incorporates studies of literature from ancient Egypt and from the Dead Sea scrolls, but his focus is on the background and use of certain key images in the text. Proverbs 1-9 belongs to an important class of biblical literature (wisdom literature), and is less well known as a whole than the related books of Job and Ecclesiastes, partly because it has been viewed until recently as a dull and muddled school-book. However, parts of it have been profoundly influential on the development of both Judaism and Christianity, and occupy a key role in modern feminist theology. Weeks demonstrates that those parts belong to a much broader and more intricate set of ideas than older scholarship allowed.

Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes ("wise ones") produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide the closest analogues for Bede's description of Caedmon's production of Old English poetry. This ground-breaking study displays the transformations created by the growth of vernacular literatures and bilingual intellectual cultures. Gaelic missionaries and educational opportunities helped shape the Northumbrian "Golden Age", its manuscripts, hagiography, and writings of Aldhelm and Bede.

Starting from the authors' discovery that the Persian epic poem V?miq and ?Adhr? by ?Un?ur? (11th century AD) derives from the ancient Greek novel of "M?tiokhos and Parthenop?," the book contains critical editions of the Greek and Persian fragments and testimonia, with English translation and comments. The exciting story of the modern recovery of the two texts is told, and the transformations of the productive theme of "The ardent lover and the virgin" are traced from Greek novel to Persian poem, and through later Persian and Turkish literature. Of particular importance is the authors' attempt to reconstruct the common plot and individual variations, adding a new work to the limited corpus of ancient novels and shedding new light on the genre of Persian epic poetry.

Beowulf, the primary epic of the English language, is a powerful heroic poem eloquently expressive of the Anglo-Saxon culture that produced it. In this beautiful book a designer, a poet, and a specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature recreate Beowulf for a modern audience. Interweaving evocative images, a new interpretation in verse, and a running commentary that helps clarify the action and setting of the poem as well as the imagery, the book brings new life to this ancient masterpiece. Randolph Swearer's oblique and allusive images create an archaic, mysterious atmosphere by depicting in forms and shadows the world of Germanic antiquity-Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon art, artifacts, and scenery. At the same time, Raymond Oliver gives Beowulf a world in which to live, filling in the cultural gaps not with a thick matrix of footnotes but with poetry itself. Unlike many translations of Beowulf in existence, Oliver's retelling of the epic uses modern verse forms for poetic effect and includes a wealth of historically authentic descriptions, characterizations, and explanations necessary for modern readers. Marijane Osborn completes the process of restoring context to the poem by supplying a commentary to clarify the historical and geographical dimensions of the story as well as the imagery that accompanies it. All three work together to bring a likeness of an old and elusive tale to today's reader. "The book's design and the commentary on it provide a unique visual complement to Oliver's poem... A strange and moving story, compellingly told and seriously interesting to any serious reader of books."-Fred C. Robinson, from the Introduction

This is a book about two empires-America and Rome-and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US state-both to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire-republicanism and slavery-to the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read-and how we might yet read.

The New Companion to the Libro de buen amor provides a platform for exploring current, innovative approaches to this classic poem. It is designed for specialists and non-specialists from a variety of fields, who are interested in investigating different aspects of Juan Ruiz's poem and developing fruitful new paths for future research. Chapters in the volume show how the book engages with Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures, and delve into its legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part One sheds light on intersecting cultural milieux, from the Christian court of Castile, to the experience of Jewish and Muslim communities. Part Two illustrates how the poem's meaning through time can be elucidated using an array of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches. Contributors are Nora C. Benedict, Erik Ekman, Denise K. Filios, Ryan D. Giles, Michelle Hamilton, Carlos Heusch, Jose Manuel Hidalgo, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Veronica Menaldi, Simone Pinet, Michael R. Solomon.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500.
None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other.
The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

This volume aims at offering a critical reassessment of the progress made in Homeric research in recent years, focussing on its two main trends, Neonalysis and Oral Theory. Interpreting Homer in the 21st century asks for a holistic approach that allows us to reconsider some of our methodological tools and preconceptions concerning what we call Homeric poetry. The neoanalytical and oral 'booms', which have to a large extent influenced the way we see Homer today, may be re-evaluated if we are willing to endorse a more flexible approach to certain scholarly taboos pertaining to these two schools of interpretation. Song-traditions, formula, performance, multiformity on the one hand, and Motivforschung, Epic Cycle on the other, may not be so incompatible as we often tend to think.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy was "but a series of footnotes to Plato." By the same token, one could argue that all of Western civilization is but an extension of the ancient Greek cultural legacy. The Greeks invented tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, philosophy, and democracy. They also made remarkable advances in science, medicine, and mathematics. In the author's view, what ties this wide-ranging intellectual ferment together is a restless search for wisdom.
The author looks at ten outstanding examples of Greek wisdom, offering fresh and engaging portraits of the epic poets (Homer, Hesiod); dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes); historians (Herodotus, Thucydides); and philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) against the background of Greek history. In each case he asks what the author has to tell us-- regardless of genre--about our place in the world and how we should live our lives.
By surveying some of the highest peaks of ancient civilization, the author argues that we gain perspective on the historical terrain that lies below. This book presents an eloquent and convincing case that a study of the Greek classics, as Gustave Flaubert explained, makes us "greater, wiser, purer."

Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make up for the loss of the original.
The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.

The Pharsalia is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of immense energy and intelligence in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. The author shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid: where Virgil writes the foundation myth for the new regime and celebrates the connections between Augustus and Aeneas, Lucan produces a savagely republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome.

Clarke takes a new look at how life, consciousness, and death are dealt with in the poems of Homer. Modern assumptions about human identity are cast aside to allow Homer's view of man to emerge. The reader of Greek poetry is encouraged to take a deeper look at words that at first seem simple and easy to translate with the result that new insights are offered on early Greek beliefs about the things that are called in English by the names of body and soul.

Lively and deeply productive discussions have focused on the topics of "magnificence" and "the sublime" in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following. They have engaged major figures from Ernst Gombrich to Theodore Adorno to Jean-Francois Lyotard. Yet, these discussions have virtually bypassed the Middle Ages. The essays in "Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics" reclaim a position for the medieval period in the theoretical discussion of art, architecture, music, and literature. These analyses of an aesthetic of grandeur show an artistic practice in the Middle Ages that strove for and celebrated grand effects.

This major study of a Markan genre, represented in the central section 8.27-10.4, ranges through Greek, rabbinic and early Christian literature, providing detailed comparison with the anecdotes in Lucian's Demonax and the Mishnah.Moeser concludes that the Markan anecdotes clearly follow the definition of, and typologies for, the Greek chreia. His analysis indicates that while the content of the three sets of anecdotes is peculiar to its respective cultural setting, the Greek, Jewish and Christian examples all function according to the purposes of the genre.

This volume is an accessible yet in-depth narratological study of Euripides' Alcestis - the earliest extant play of Euripides and one of the most experimental masterpieces of Greek tragedy, not only standing in place of a satyr-play but also preserving at least some of its typical features. Commencing from the widely-held view, so lamentably ignored within the domain of Classics, that a narratology of drama should be predicated upon the notion of narrative as verbal, as well as visual, rendition of a story, this unique volume contextualizes the play in terms of its reception by the original audience, locating the intricate narrative tropes of the plot in the dynamics of fifth-century Athenian mythology and religion.

In his utopian novel Hiera Anagraphe (Sacred History) Euhemerus of Messene (ca. 300 B.C.) describes his travel to the island Panchaia in the Indian Ocean where he discovered an inscribed stele in the temple of Zeus Triphylius. It turned out that the Olympian gods (Uranos, Kronos, Zeus) were deified kings. The travels of Zeus allowed to describe peoples and places all over the world. Winiarczyk investigates the sources of the theological views of Euhemerus. He proves that Euhemerus' religious views were rooted in old Greek tradition (the worship of heroes, gods as founders of their own cult, tombs of gods, euergetism, rationalistic interpretation of myths, the explanations of the origin of religion by the sophists, the ruler cult). The description of the Panchaian society is intended to suggest an archaic and closed culture, in which the stele recording res gestae of the deified kings might have been preserved. The translation of Ennius' Euhemerus sive Sacra historia (ca. 200 - ca. 194) is a free prose rendering, which Lactantius knew only indirectly. The book is concluded by a short history of Euhemerism in the pagan, Christian and Jewish literature.

A collection of articles by Richard E. Mitchell presenting all the major historiographical problems scholars encounter in reconstructing the early Republic. Mitchell was one of the first scholars to question the practice of taking the broad outlines of the accounts handed down by Roman historians (writing hundreds of years later) at face value in writing modern accounts of the period.

Nine renowned sinologists present a range of studies that display the riches of medieval Chinese verse in varied guises. All major verse-forms, including shi, fu, and ci, are examined, with a special focus on poetry's negotiation with tradition and historical context. Dozens of previously untranslated works are here rendered in English for the first time, and readers will enter a literary culture that was deeply infused with imperatives of wit, learning, and empathy. Among the diverse topics met with in this volume are metaphysical poetry as a medium of social exchange, the place of ruins in Chinese poetry, the reality and imaginary of frontier borderlands, the enigma of misattribution, and how a 19th-century Frenchwoman discovered Tang poetry for the Western world. Contributors include Timothy Wai Keung Chan, Robert Joe Cutter, Ronald Egan, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Stephen Owen, Wendy Swartz, Ding Xiang Warner, and Pauline Yu.

A close analysis of the Republic s diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato s remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic s prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato s distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust."

In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or "Rezeptionsdsthetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the "mentaliti of Greece and Rome.
In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were asked to produce a representative collection of essays to illustrate the applicability of some of the new approaches to Greek and Latin authors or literary forms and problems.
The scope of the volume was deliberately limited to literary investigation, broadly construed, of Greek and Roman authors. Broader areas of the history and culture of the ancient world impinge in the essays, but are not their central focus.
The volume also contains a separate bibliography, offering for the first time a complete bibliography of classical studies which incorporate modern critical theory.

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Euripides provides a comprehensive account of the influence and appropriation of all extant Euripidean plays since their inception: from antiquity to modernity, across cultures and civilizations, from multiple perspectives and within a broad range of human experience and cultural trends, namely literature, intellectual history, visual arts, music, opera and dance, stage and cinematography. A concerted work by an international team of specialists in the field, the volume is addressed to a wide and multidisciplinary readership of classical reception studies, from experts to non-experts. Contributors engage in a vividly and lively interactive dialogue with the Ancient and the Modern which, while illuminating aspects of ancient drama and highlighting their ever-lasting relevance, offers a thoughtful and layered guide of the human condition.

Close Relationships is Geert Jan van Gelder's groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the diverse facts and opinions found in pre-modern Arabic texts - both literary and non-literary - concerning incest and inbreeding resulting from repeated close-kin marriage. The pre-Islamic Bedouin Arabs knew about the dangers of human inbreeding, yet by the time the Prophet Muhammed is said to have warned Marry strangers, then you will not produce stunted offspring marrying one's father's brother's daughter had traditionally been the preferred choice in order to keep wealth and marriage in the same family. The Qur'an laid down the basic rules of marriage impediments, which, uniquely, include not only blood-relationships but also milk-relationships i.e. being suckled by the same woman. Later generations of jurists and exegetes elaborated and discussed these rules; some of them tried to justify and explain the prohibitions, mostly in ethical and social rather than in biological terms. legends, creation stories (Adam and Eve's children), dream interpretation, and polemics with other religions or ethnic groups. In particular, the Zoroastrian Persians, who allegedly recommended next-of-kin marriage in pre-Islamic times, were attacked. Van Gelder acknowledges that while it is dangerous to make general assertions about the difference between Western and Arab or Middle Eastern customs and attitudes, he argues that the theme of incest, so prominent at least in European literature since the Greek myths, is somewhat marginal in Arabic literature. Many of the relevant passages have been translated into English specially for this richly documented book that will be of interest not only to philologists and students of Arabic literature or Islamic culture but also to the general reader interested in the history of incest and inbreeding and attitudes towards these closely related concepts.

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus explores the various ways Aeschylus' tragedies have been discussed, parodied, translated, revisioned, adapted, and integrated into other works over the course of the last 2500 years. Immensely popular while alive, Aeschylus' reception begins in his own lifetime. And, while he has not been the most reproduced of the three Attic tragedians on the stage since then, his receptions have transcended genre and crossed to nearly every continent. While still engaging with Aeschylus' theatrical reception, the volume also explores Aeschylus off the stage--in radio, the classroom, television, political theory, philosophy, science fiction and beyond.