Literary Criticism : Ancient & Classical

Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece. This book examines, for example, the tragic response to legislation regulating family life that may have begun as early as the sixth century. It also draws upon contemporary studies of virtue ethics and upon feminist reconsiderations of the Western ethical tradition. Foley maintains that by viewing public issues through the lens of the family, tragedy asks whether public and private morality can operate on the same terms. Moreover, the plays use women to represent significant moral alternatives. Tragedy thus exploits, reinforces, and questions cultural clichés about women and gender in a fashion that resonates with contemporary Athenian social and political issues. more...

Price: $55.00

A chronological guide to influential Greek and Roman writers, Fifty Key Classical Authors is an invaluable introduction to the literature, philosophy and history of the ancient world. Including essays on Sappho, Polybius and Lucan, as well as on major figures such as Homer, Plato, Catullus and Cicero, this book is a vital tool for all students of classical civilization. more...

Price: $33.95

Preface. The Eighteenth Century. 1. Gibbon's Historical Imagination. 2. Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire. 3. Reflections on Gibbon's Library. 4. Watchmen: Gibbon's Autobiographies. 5. Suetonius in the Eighteenth Century. 6. The Rediscovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The Nineteenth Century. 7. Sign Language. 8. Berlioz, Virgil, and Rome. 9. Edward Lear in Petra. 10. Burckhardt on Late Antiquity. The Twentieth Century. 11. The New Old World. 12. The Julian Poems of C. P. Cavafy. 13. Cavafy and Apollonios. 14. The New Cavafy. 15. The Later Momigliano. 16. A Modern Aesop. 17. Auden on the Fall of Rome. Bibliography more...

Price: $45.00

In the early Roman Empire, women's domestic roles were given new public prominence. Through an examination of early imperial representations of women's activities and responsibilities within the household, Kristina Milnor argues that this emphasis on private morality is actually a new way of understanding the nature of political life. - ;The age of Augustus has long been recognized as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on `traditional' feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Kristina Milnor takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and Columella, she argues that. female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted Roman public life. - ;...[a] fine new study - Matthew Leigh, Times Literary Supplement;It reads well...and will fuel many discussions in class and conference. - Classical World more...

Price: $50.00

In power, passion, and the brilliant display of moral conflict, the drama of ancient Greece remains unsurpassed. For this volume, Professor Hadas chose nine plays which display the diversity and grandeur of tragedy, and the critical and satiric genius of comedy, in outstanding translations of the past and present. more...

Price: $5.95