The hegemonization of European thought by Greek antiquity was famously questioned by major representatives of the avant-garde. However, this is only one ideological dimension of the extraordinarily intricate politics of the European avant-garde s response to Greek antiquity a dimension that has been overrated in current research on the subject. "Greek Mythologies" interrogates this one-sided methodological approach by exploring in a systematic and cross-disciplinary manner the complex, at times contradictory, responses to ancient Greece in Greek and broader Western European modernism. In this pioneering book, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis investigates the multilayered (often underexplored) ideological, literary, artistic, and epistemological channels through which ancient Greek mythology was received by the avant-garde as cultural capital and discursive paradigm conducive to a radical reassessment of established socioaesthetic structures. Exploring the dynamics of ruination and the reconfiguration of fundamental icons of ancient mythology (for example, Oedipus, Pasiphae, the Minotaur, the Danaids) in Greek surrealism, this book masterfully demonstrates that Greek antiquity, despite its theoretical devaluation by influential modernists, became an integral constituent of avant-garde myth-making. Focusing mainly on highly provocative dialogues between variants of ancient Greek "mythoi" and twentieth-century Greek and other European mechanisms of "mythogenesis, " the book navigates new territories in the field of reception studies."

This book explores diverse but complementary interdisciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and influence of the work of C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Kavafis), one of the most important twentieth-century European poets. Written by leading international scholars in a number of disciplines (critical theory, gender studies, comparative literature, English studies, Greek studies, anthropology, classics), the essays of this volume situate Cavafy s poetry within the broader contexts of modernism and aestheticism and investigate its complex and innovative responses to European literary traditions (from Greek antiquity to modernity) as well as its multifaceted impact on major figures of world literature from North America to South Africa.

Contributors include Eve Sedgwick, Helen Vendler, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Richard Dellamora, Mark Doty, James Faubion, Diana Haas, John Chioles, Edmund Keeley, Albert Henrichs, Kathleen Coleman, Gregory Nagy, Michael Paschalis, Peter Jeffreys, Diskin Clay, and Panagiotis Roilos.

C.P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis) is one of the most important Greek poets since antiquity. He was born, lived, and died in Alexandria (1863-1933), with brief periods spent in England, Constantinople, and Athens. Cavafy set in motion the most powerful modernism in early twentieth-century European poetry, exhibiting simple truths about eroticism, history, and philosophy-an inscrutable triumvirate that informs the Greek language and culture in all their diachrony. The Cavafy "Canon" plays with the complexities of ironic Socratic thought, suffused with the honesty of unadorned iambic verse.

Based on a fifty-year continuous scholarly and literary interaction with Cavafy's poetry and its Greek and western European intertexts, John Chioles has produced an authoritative and exceptionally nuanced translation of the complex linguistic registers of Cavafy's "Canon" into English.

Ancient Greek vase-paintings offer broad-ranging and unprecedented early perspectives on the often intricate interplay of images and texts. By bringing together-for the first time in English-language scholarship-an international group of leading scholars in classical art and archaeology who have worked on vase-inscriptions, this book investigates epigraphic technicalities of Attic and non-Attic inscriptions on pottery as well as their broader iconographic and sociocultural significance. The ten chapters in this book propose original and expert methodological approaches to the study of vase-inscriptions and vasepaintings, while also foregrounding the outstanding but not fully examined importance of the area of vase-inscriptions for current research on ancient Greek visual representations. Epigraphy of Art: Ancient Greek Vase-Inscriptions and Vase-Paintings constitutes a major contribution to the fields of Greek epigraphy and classical art and archaeology and will prove significant for epigraphists, archaeologists, and art-historians interested in the complexities of the interaction of art and text.

Investigating ritual in Greece from cross-disciplinary and transhistorical perspectives, "Greek Ritual Poetics" offers novel readings of the pivotal role of ritual in Greek traditions by exploring a broad spectrum of texts, art, and social practices. This collection of essays written by an international group of leading scholars in a number of disciplines presents a variety of methodological approaches to secular and religious rituals, and to the narrative and conceptual strategies of their reenactment and manipulation in literary, pictorial, and social discourses. Addressing understudied aspects of Greek ritual and societies, this book will prove significant for classicists, anthropologists, Byzantinists, art historians, neohellenists, and comparatists interested in the interaction between ritual, aesthetics, and cultural communicative systems.

This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the "reading" of Sappho's songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception. In this wide-ranging synthesis, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis investigates visual representations and ancient texts in their synchronic and diachronic multilayeredness to trace the discursive nexuses that defined the making of "Sappho" in the late archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic periods. Offering a systematic analysis of the contextual cues provided by vase paintings and focusing on the sociocultural institution of the symposion, this book explores the intricate modes of the assimilation of Sappho's poetry into diverse social, aesthetic, and performative contexts. Drawing on a number of disciplines, including archaeology, papyrology, and anthropology, "Sappho in the Making" articulates a new methodological Problematik on the reception of archaic Greek socioaesthetic cultures.

How can we read the intricacies of figural representations painted on pottery? Such a hermeneutic progress depends on our broader understanding of ancient Greek visual signes and languages, as well as on the methodological strategies we consturct and apply to our analyses. Exploring diverse mehtodologies, adopted or advanced in older as well as in more recent interdisciplinary research on ancient Greek vases, An Archaeology of Representaions: Ancient Greek Vase-Painting and Contermporary Methodosogies offers original approaches to vase-paintings of archaic and classical Greece, with an emphasis on the semiotics of ancient modes of representation. Written by an internatinal group of eminent scholars, the essays in this book address methodological questions and propose wie-ranging interpretive arguments for the study of a large number of images from the rich and complex corpus of ancient Gree vase-painting.