"Like love, Greek poetry was not for hereafter," writes Eva
Stehle, "but shared in the present mirth and laughter of festival,
ceremony, and party." Describing how men and women, young and
adult, sang or recited in public settings, Stehle treats poetry as
an occasion for the performer's self-presentation. She discusses a
wide range of pre-Hellenistic poetry, including Sappho's, compares
how men and women speak about themselves, and constructs an
innovative approach to performance that illuminates gender
ideology. After considering the audience and the function of
different modes of performance--community, bardic, and closed
groups--Stehle explores this poetry as gendered speech, which
interacts with performers' bodily presence to create social
identities for the speakers. Texts for female choral performers
reveal how women in public spoke in order to disavow the power of
their speech and their sexual power. Male performers, however,
could manipulate gender as an ideological system: they sometimes
claimed female identity in addition to male, associated themselves
with triumph over a defeated (mythical) female figure, or asserted
their disconnection from women, thereby creating idealized social
identities for themselves. A final chapter concentrates on the
written poetry of Sappho, which borrows the communicative strategy
of writing in order to create a fictional speaker distinct from the
singer, a "Sappho" whom others could re-create in imagination.
Originally published in 1996.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
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