Preposterous Poetics
Preposterous Poetics
The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.
- Introduces a broad range of literature never before studied together that throws crucial light on the development of Western culture
- Shows how crucial and influential texts have been ignored by the formation of modern disciplines
- Employs a brilliant new methodological exposition of how literary form changes due to religious changes
Reviews & endorsements
'A playful book, brimming with merriment in its stories and curiosities .' Kate Cooper, The Times Literary Supplement
Product details
September 2020Hardback
9781108494823
315 pages
235 × 160 × 25 mm
0.609kg
1 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Forms of attention: time and narrative in Ecphrasis
- 2. When size matters: erotics, the epyllion, and Colluthus' Rape of Helen
- 3. In the beginning
- 4. Preposterous poetics and the erotics of death
- 5. Strange dogs: Joseph and Aseneth and the dynamics of transformation
- 6. Life forms: biography and rabbinical writing coda
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography. Index.
