Homer And The Question Of Strife From Erasmus To Hobbes

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Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes

Author : Jessica Wolfe
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442650265
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (426 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes by : Jessica Wolfe

Download or read book Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes written by Jessica Wolfe and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer's epic poems the Iliad, theOdyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era's intellectual, political, and theological struggles. Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and thinkers as varied as Erasmus, Rabelais, Spenser, Milton, and Hobbes presented Homer as a great champion of conflict or its most eloquent critic. Jessica Wolfe weaves together an exceptional range of sources, including manuscript commentaries, early modern marginalia, philosophical and political treatises, and the visual arts. Wolfe's transnational and multilingual study is a landmark work in the study of classical reception that has a great deal to offer to anyone examining the literary, political, and intellectual life of early modern Europe.

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes

Author : Jessica Wolfe
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442622687
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (426 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes by : Jessica Wolfe

Download or read book Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes written by Jessica Wolfe and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer’s epic poems – the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him – served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era’s intellectual, political, and theological struggles. Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and thinkers as varied as Erasmus, Rabelais, Spenser, Milton, and Hobbes presented Homer as a great champion of conflict or its most eloquent critic. Jessica Wolfe weaves together an exceptional range of sources, including manuscript commentaries, early modern marginalia, philosophical and political treatises, and the visual arts. Wolfe’s transnational and multilingual study is a landmark work in the study of classical reception that has a great deal to offer to anyone examining the literary, political, and intellectual life of early modern Europe.

Homer in Wittenberg

Author : William P. Weaver
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192679139
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer in Wittenberg by : William P. Weaver

Download or read book Homer in Wittenberg written by William P. Weaver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homer in Wittenberg draws on manuscript and printed materials to demonstrate Homer's foundational significance for educational and theological reform during the Reformation in Wittenberg. In the first study of Melanchthon's Homer annotations from three different periods spanning his career, and the first book-length study of his reading of a classical author, William Weaver offers a new perspective on the liberal arts and textual authority in the Renaissance and Reformation. Melanchthon's significance in the teaching of the liberal arts has long been recognized, but Homer's prominent place in his educational reforms is not widely known. Homer was instrumental in Melanchthon's attempt to transform the university curriculum, and his reforms of the liberal arts are clarified by his engagements with Homeric speech, a subject of interest in recent Homer scholarship. Beginning with his Greek grammar published just as he arrived in Wittenberg in 1518, and proceeding through his 1547 work on dialectic, Homer in Wittenberg shows that teaching Homer decisively shaped Melanchthon's redesign of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Melanchthon embarked on reforming the liberal arts with the ultimate objective of reforming theological education. His teaching of Homer illustrates the philosophical principles behind his use of well-known theological terms including sola scriptura, law and gospel, and loci communes. Homer's significance extended even to a practical theology of prayer, and Wittenberg scholia on Homer from the 1550s illustrate how the Homeric poem could be used to exercise faith as well as literary judgment and eloquence.

Erasmus of Rotterdam

Author : William Barker
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789144507
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (891 download)

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Book Synopsis Erasmus of Rotterdam by : William Barker

Download or read book Erasmus of Rotterdam written by William Barker and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language popular biography of widely influential northern Renaissance scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam in twenty years. Erasmus of Rotterdam came from an obscure background but, through remarkable perseverance, skill, and independent vision, became a powerful and controversial intellectual figure in Europe in the early sixteenth century. He was known for his vigorous opposition to war, intolerance, and hypocrisy, and at the same time for irony and subtlety that could confuse his friends as well as his opponents. His ideas about language, society, scholarship, and religion influenced the rise of the Reformation and had a huge impact on the humanities, and that influence continues today. This book shows how an independent textual scholar was able, by the power of the printing press and his wits, to attain both fame and notoriety. Drawing on the immense wealth of recent scholarship devoted to Erasmus, Erasmus of Rotterdam is the first English-language popular biography of this crucial thinker in twenty years.

Homer's Iliad and the Problem of Force

Author : Charles H. Stocking
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192862871
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer's Iliad and the Problem of Force by : Charles H. Stocking

Download or read book Homer's Iliad and the Problem of Force written by Charles H. Stocking and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of force has long remained a problem of interpretation for readers of Homer's Iliad, ever since Simone Weil famously proclaimed it as the poem's main subject. This book seeks to address that problem through a full-scale treatment of the language of force in the Iliad from both philological and philosophical perspectives. Each chapter explores the different types of Iliadic force in combination with the reception of the Iliad in the French intellectual tradition. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the different terms for force in the Iliad give expression to distinct relations between self and "other." At the same time, this book reveals how the Iliad as a whole undermines the very relations of force which characters within the poem seek to establish. Ultimately, this study of force in the Iliad offers an occasion to reconsider human subjectivity in Homeric poetry.

The Renaissance of Feeling

Author : Kirk Essary
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350269816
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis The Renaissance of Feeling by : Kirk Essary

Download or read book The Renaissance of Feeling written by Kirk Essary and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a re-reading of Erasmus's works, this book shows that emotion and affectivity were central to his writings. It argues that Erasmus's conception of emotion was highly complex and richly diverse by tracing how the Dutch humanist writes about emotion not only from different perspectives-theological, philosophical, literary, rhetorical, medical-but also in different genres. In doing so, this book suggests, Erasmus provided a distinctive, if not unique, Christian humanist emotional style. Demonstrating that Erasmus consulted multiple intellectual traditions and previous works in his thoughts on affectivity, The Renaissance of Feeling sheds light on how understanding emotions in late medieval and early modern Europe was a multi-disciplinary affair for humanist scholars. It argues that the rediscovery and proliferation ancient texts during the so-called renaissance resulted in shifting perspectives on how emotions were described and understood, and on their significance for Christian thought and practice. The book shows how the very availability of source material, coupled with humanists' eagerness to engage with multiple intellectual traditions gave rise to new understandings of feeling in the 16th century. Essary shows how Erasmus provides the clearest example of such an intellectual inheritance by examining his writings about emotion across much of his vast corpus, including literary and rhetorical works, theological treatises, textual commentaries, religious disputations, and letters. Considering the rich and diverse ways that Erasmus wrote about emotions and affectivity, this book provides a new lens to study his works and sheds light on how emotions were understood in early modern Europe.

Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey

Author : Andrea Catanzaro
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135120565X
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (512 download)

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Book Synopsis Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey by : Andrea Catanzaro

Download or read book Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey written by Andrea Catanzaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facing censorship and being confined to the fringes of the political debate of his time, Thomas Hobbes turned his attention to translating Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek into English. Many have not considered enough the usefulness of these translations. In this book, Andrea Catanzaro analyses the political value of Hobbes’ translations of Homer’s works and exposes the existence of a link between the translations and the previous works of the Malmesbury philosopher. In doing so, he asks: • What new information concerning Hobbes' political and philosophical thought can be rendered from mere translation? • What new offerings can a man in his eighties at the time offer, having widely explained his political ideas in numerous famous essays and treatises? • What new elements can be deduced in a text that was well-known in England and where there were better versions than the ones produced by Hobbes? Andrea Catanzaro’s commentary and theoretical interpretation offers an incentive to study Hobbes lesser known works in the wider development of Western political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Theaters of Pardoning

Author : Bernadette Meyler
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501739395
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Theaters of Pardoning by : Bernadette Meyler

Download or read book Theaters of Pardoning written by Bernadette Meyler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty. Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

Author : Alexander Loney
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190905360
Total Pages : 611 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod by : Alexander Loney

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod written by Alexander Loney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.

Homer

Author : James I. Porter
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226675904
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer by : James I. Porter

Download or read book Homer written by James I. Porter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-22 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of our ongoing fascination with Homer, the man and the myth. Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived, and whether he was an actual person, a myth, or merely a shared idea. Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of this character, James I. Porter explores the sources of Homer’s mystique and their impact since the first recorded mentions of Homer in ancient Greece. Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.

George Chapman: Homer's 'Iliad'

Author : Robert S. Miola
Publisher : MHRA
ISBN 13 : 1781881189
Total Pages : 482 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (818 download)

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Book Synopsis George Chapman: Homer's 'Iliad' by : Robert S. Miola

Download or read book George Chapman: Homer's 'Iliad' written by Robert S. Miola and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famously praised by John Keats for speaking ‘loud and bold’, Chapman’s Homer brought Greek poetry and civilization to life for centuries of readers. Many have praised its rough energy and creativity, the crashing power of the verses, its grim depiction of life and death in war. The companion to Gordon Kendal’s edition of Chapman’s Odyssey, this edition of his Iliad features a newly edited version of the 1611 printing (including all the translator’s combative notes and commentary) in modern spelling and punctuation. The introduction, “Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” explores the complicated history of revision behind the text, the intermediate Latin sources, and, most important, Chapman’s early modern reception of the Iliad, that is, the later political, cultural, social, literary, moral, and theological ideas that shape his reading of the ancient Greek text. The edition provides also full textual collations, lexical and explanatory notes, a glossary, bibliography, an appendix on Chapman’s contributions to the English language, and index. Like his great contemporary and rival, William Shakespeare, Chapman was a dramatist and one of the great wordsmiths of the Renaissance, a creator of the language that we speak and write today as Modern English. Chapman’s Iliad deploys the resources of this developing English language for stunning poetic effects; this raw and powerful version of Homer’s inspired song stands also as a masterpiece of English literature.

The Cambridge Guide to Homer

Author : Corinne Ondine Pache
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108663621
Total Pages : 974 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (86 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Guide to Homer by : Corinne Ondine Pache

Download or read book The Cambridge Guide to Homer written by Corinne Ondine Pache and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 974 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

The Choice of Odysseus

Author : Sarah Van der Laan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192524267
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis The Choice of Odysseus by : Sarah Van der Laan

Download or read book The Choice of Odysseus written by Sarah Van der Laan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.

Mining Language

Author : Allison Margaret Bigelow
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469654393
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Mining Language by : Allison Margaret Bigelow

Download or read book Mining Language written by Allison Margaret Bigelow and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

Peacemaking and the Canon Law of the Catholic Church

Author : Charles Reid, Jr.
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004545743
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

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Book Synopsis Peacemaking and the Canon Law of the Catholic Church by : Charles Reid, Jr.

Download or read book Peacemaking and the Canon Law of the Catholic Church written by Charles Reid, Jr. and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume unites three disparate strands of historical and legal experience. Nearly from its beginning, the Catholic Church has sought to promote peace – among warring parties, and among private litigants. The volume explores three vehicles the Church has used to promote peace: papal diplomacy of international disputes both medieval and contemporary; the arbitration of disputes among litigants; and the use of the tools of reconciliation to bring about rapprochement between ecclesiastical superiors and those subject to their authority. The book concludes with an appendix exploring a wide variety of hypothetical, yet plausible scenarios in which the Church might use its good offices to repair breaches among persons and nations.

The First Pagan Historian

Author : Frederic Clark
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190492317
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis The First Pagan Historian by : Frederic Clark

Download or read book The First Pagan Historian written by Frederic Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed himself as eyewitness to the Trojan War, challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a milennium, Dares' work was circulated as the first pagan history. It promised facts and only facts about what really happened at Troy--precise casualty figures, no mentions of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as sensational as it was fake. From the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson, The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares' rise and fall. Along the way, it reconstructs Dares' central place in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.

Joy of the Worm

Author : Drew Daniel
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226816508
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis Joy of the Worm by : Drew Daniel

Download or read book Joy of the Worm written by Drew Daniel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy. In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between “self-killing” and “suicide.” Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. “Joy of the worm” emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate “trolling,” but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.