For better or worse, the ancient Greeks retain their cultural, political, and philosophical authority for contemporary educators and actors. Maureen Dowd has talked about the Hellenization of the Bush administration, Thucydides has been used as a template to analyze the Iraqi War and the War on Terror, Greek drama has been repeatedly performed in sometimes spectacular if unconventional ways, while the Trojan War, the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans, and Alexander have all been the subjects of recent films. Last year the New York Times carried a front page story about "conservatives" taking a "new tack" by establishing "beachheads" for programs in Western Civilization and American Institutions in which the ancient Greeks hold pride of place. The contributors to When Worlds Elide are also invested in having Greek philosophy, literature, and political theory taken seriously in contemporary debates-whether over modes of interpreting Plato, Athenian democracy, gender, ethnicity, or materiality. What distinguishes this book is the substantive range of the essays in it and the generative potentialities of "using" ancient authors and events in analyzing these debates. It begins from the premise that "the Greeks" (like "the French" or "the Chinese") obscures the contested histories of ethnic, geographic, and political formations in favor of an idealized dehistoricized collectivity. The also book also illustrates the ways in which ancient texts must be understood within the history of interpretative practices, which means that "the Greeks" are more a moving target than a stable entity, and that each generation of interlocutors formulates continually transforming questions, readings, and arguments. Finally, this book supposes that an interrogation of "the Greek legacy" depends on interdisciplinary work where interdisciplinarity functions as a verb-that is, something that is always in the process of being achieved.

Myths and legends of this rebellious god, who defied Zeus to steal fire for mankind, thrive in art and literature from ancient Greece to the present day. Prometheus' gifts to mortals of the raw materials of culture and technological advancement, along with the curse of despair that followed the enlightenment of humankind, have formed the basis of a poetic and powerful embodiment of the human condition.
Seeking to locate the nature of this compelling tale's continuing relevance throughout history, Carol Dougherty traces a history of the myth from its origins in ancient Greece to its resurgence in the works of the Romantic age and beyond. A Prometheus emerges that was a rebel against Zeus's tyranny to Aeschylus, a defender of political and artistic integrity to Shelley and a symbol of technological innovation during the industrial revolution, his resilience and adaptability illuminating his power and importance in Western culture.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the Prometheus myth, emphasizing the vitality and flexibility of his myth in a variety of historical, literary, and artistic contexts of the ancient Greeks, the Romantics, and twentieth-century English poet, Tony Harrison. It is an essential introduction to the Promethean myth for readers interested in Classics, the arts and literature alike.

For better or worse, the ancient Greeks retain their cultural, political, and philosophical authority for contemporary educators and actors. Maureen Dowd has talked about the Hellenization of the Bush administration, Thucydides has been used as a template to analyze the Iraqi War and the War on Terror, Greek drama has been repeatedly performed in sometimes spectacular if unconventional ways, while the Trojan War, the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans, and Alexander have all been the subjects of recent films. Last year the New York Times carried a front page story about 'conservatives' taking a 'new tack' by establishing 'beachheads' for programs in Western Civilization and American Institutions in which the ancient Greeks hold pride of place. The contributors to When Worlds Elide are also invested in having Greek philosophy, literature, and political theory taken seriously in contemporary debates-whether over modes of interpreting Plato, Athenian democracy, gender, ethnicity, or materiality. What distinguishes this book is the substantive range of the essays in it and the generative potentialities of 'using' ancient authors and events in analyzing these debates. It begins from the premise that 'the Greeks' (like 'the French' or 'the Chinese') obscures the contested histories of ethnic, geographic, and political formations in favor of an idealized dehistoricized collectivity. The also book also illustrates the ways in which ancient texts must be understood within the history of interpretative practices, which means that 'the Greeks' are more a moving target than a stable entity, and that each generation of interlocutors formulates continually transforming questions, readings, and arguments. Finally, this book supposes that an interrogation of 'the Greek legacy' depends on interdisciplinary work where interdisciplinarity functions as a verb-that is, something that is always in the process of being achieved.

The Raft of Odysseus looks at the fascinating intersection of traditional myth with an enthnographically-viewed Homeric world. Carol Dougherty argues that the resourcefulness of Odysseus as an adventurer on perilous seas served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions. The fantastic adventures of Odysseus act as a prism for the experiences of Homer's own listeners--traders, seafarers, storytellers, soldiers--and give us a glimpse into their own world of hopes and fears, 500 years after the Iliadic events were supposed to have happened. In the course of her argument, Dougherty makes liberal use of what we know about Mycenean and archaic artifacts, comparing the realities of historical shipbuilding or weaving, for example, with the often magnificently inflated account of the epics.

Challenging the conventional perception of ancient Greece as the paradigm for unified models of culture, this study offers an alternative view of archaic and classical Greece. It is one in which the contact, conflict and collaboration of a variety of "subcultures" combine to comprise what we now understand as "Greekness." The volume argues for the recognition and analysis of cultural contact within Greece, focusing on the micromechanics of cultural exchange, the permeability of cultural boundaries, and the significance of Delphi's geographically marginal, yet symbolically central, location as an "internal contact zone."

Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continued to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled. This book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement. Unique in its focus on issues of representation and colonial ideology, rather than the traditional historical approach, this book adds much to the study of the archaic colonization movement. Through new historicist readings, Carol Dougherty shows how, long after the Greek colonization movement itself was over, the colonial tale, embedded in important poetic genres and performed as part of significant civic occasions, enabled the Greeks to continue to colonize the past and to establish themselves as the imperial power in that cultural memory.

With no recent publications discussing Prometheus at length, this book provides a much-needed introduction to the Promethean myth of this rebellious god who defied Zeus to steal fire for mankind.

Seeking to locate the nature of this compelling tale 's continuing relevance throughout history, Carol Dougherty traces a history of the myth of Prometheus from its origins in ancient Greece, to its resurgence in the works of the Romantic era and beyond.

Offering a comparative approach that includes visual material and film, the book reveals a Prometheus who was a rebel against Zeus tyranny to Aeschylus, a defender of political and artistic integrity to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a symbol of technological innovation during the industrial revolution; his resilience and adaptability illuminating his power and importance in Western culture.

Prometheus is an essential introduction to the Promethean myth for all readers of classics, the arts and literature alike.

This volume brings together essays by archaeologists, historians, and literary scholars in a comprehensive examination of the Greek archaic age. A time of dramatic and revolutionary change when many of the institutions and thought patterns that would shape Greek culture evolved, this period has become the object of renewed scholarly interest in recent years. Yet it has resisted reconstruction, largely because its documentation is less complete than that of the classical period. In order to read the text of archaic Greece, the contributors here apply new methods--including anthropology, literary theory, and cultural history--to central issues, among them the interpretation of ritual, the origins of hero cult and its relation to politics, the evolving ideologies of colonization and athletic victory, the representation of statesmen and sages, and the serendipitous development of democracy. With their interdisciplinary approaches, the various essays demonstrate the interdependence of politics, religion, and economics in this period; the importance of public performance for negotiating social interaction; and the creative use of the past to structure a changing present. Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece offers a vigorous and coherent response to the scholarly challenges of the archaic period.

Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature brings Homer's Odyssey together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Cormac McCarthy's The Road to produce new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home. While some novels share with the Odyssey a celebration of the creative process of improvisation to rethink the relationship between home and travel, others draw upon nostalgia - our complicated longing for home - to unsettle the inevitability of return. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of Homer's poem, each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody to ask new questions of that well-read text. Does travel reinforce or destabilize our notion of home? Are mobility and domesticity irrevocably gendered, or can we imagine a world in which Penelope travels and Odysseus stays home? Just as Odysseus continually reinvents his own identity with each new encounter, both abroad and at home, so too we, as readers, participate in an improvisatory interpretive experiment of our own. This volume sets out a new model for reading ancient and contemporary texts together - one that challenges the conventional chronological assumptions inherent in many works of classical reception. No longer a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it the same, the Odyssey, together with the novels with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.

Originally published in 2003, The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture challenges the conventional perception of ancient Greece as the paradigm for unified models of culture. It offers an alternative view of archaic and classical Greece, one in which the contact, conflict and collaboration of a variety of 'sub-cultures' combine to comprise what we understand as 'Greekness'. This volume argues for the recognition and analysis of cultural contact within Greece, focussing on the micromechanics of cultural exchange, the permeability of cultural boundaries, and the significance of Delphi's geographically marginal, yet symbolically central location as an 'internal contact zone'. Through attention to everyday practices and professions, the essays reveal important ways of conceiving of diversity within Greek culture, ranging from the non-elite culture of athletic trainers to the competing musical cultures at work in fifth-century Athens.