Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres
Title | Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres PDF eBook |
Author | Emmanuela Bakola |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 421 |
Release | 2013-04-18 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 1107033314 |
Explores comedy's voracious and multifarious dialogue with a large spectrum of literary, sub-literary and paraliterary traditions surrounding and shaping it.
Ancient Greek Comedy
Title | Ancient Greek Comedy PDF eBook |
Author | Almut Fries |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Pages | 371 |
Release | 2020-06-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3110646269 |
This volume, in honour of Angus M. Bowie, collects seventeen original essays on Greek comedy. Its contributors treat questions of origin, genre and artistic expression, interpret individual plays from different angles (literary, historical, performative) and cover aspects of reception from antiquity to the 20th century. Topics that have not received much attention so far, such as the prehistory of Doric comedy or music in Old Comedy, receive a prominent place. The essays are arranged in three sections: (1) Genre, (2) Texts and Contexts, (3) Reception. Within each section the chapters are as far as possible arranged in chronological order, according to historical time or to the (putative) dates of the plays under discussion. Thus readers will be able to construe their own diachronic and thematic connections, for example between the portrayal of stock characters in early Doric farce and developed Attic New Comedy or between different forms of comic reception in the fourth century BC. The book is intended for professional scholars, graduate and undergraduate students. Its wide range of subjects and approaches will appeal not only to those working on Greek comedy, but to anyone interested in Greek drama and its afterlife.
Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy
Title | Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy PDF eBook |
Author | Mario Telò |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 2016-04-18 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 022630969X |
Aristophanes and the Generation of Greek Comedy challenges the ways in which both ancient and modern scholarship have created the figure we know as Aristophanes and it builds on Telo's the long-term project to study the genres of ancient Greek literature (particularly plays) as well as genre theory more generally.Telo asks, how did the image we know of Aristophanes arose? Aristophanes' supremacy is traced, by Telo, back to the playwright himself. Early scholars presented Aristophanes' work as a prestigious object, an expression of supposedly transhistorical values of dignity (semnotes) and self-control (sophrosune). This construction of the merits of Aristophanic comedy over that of other varieties depends on its textual connections with other works, particularly tragedies. Telo shows, through close readings of Wasps and Clouds, for example, how the Aristophanic style is actually figured in the plays as the tactile experience of a garment, a soft, protective cloak intended to shield an audience from the debilitating effects of competitors' comedies during the Dionysia. Aristophanes' narratives of sons and fathers, poet and audience, is thus at the center of the discourse that has shaped his canonical dominance ever since.
The Boastful Chef
Title | The Boastful Chef PDF eBook |
Author | John Wilkins |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | |
Genre | Food in literature |
ISBN | 9781383037357 |
It is well known that ancient Greek comedy is interested in food and wine. Many plays conclude with a feast: further, they were produced at festivals of Dionysos where eating and drinking took place. This book explains the importance of food to comedy: it was a medium through which comedy could represent the material, social, agricultural, political and religious worlds to the Greek city-state. Comedy was a powerful cultural commentator partly because the foods that it represented were resonant markers of the culture. There could be no comedy without food. Related genres and artefacts are also considered. The text also contains translations of hundreds of comic fragments; and it reassesses the division of comedy into Sicilian and Attic Old, Middle, and New.
The Language of Greek Comedy
Title | The Language of Greek Comedy PDF eBook |
Author | Andreas Willi |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 354 |
Release | 2002-10-03 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 0199245479 |
The contributions to this volume illustrate how the linguistic study of Greek comedy can deepen our knowledge of the intricate connections between the dramatic texts and their literary and socio-cultural environment. Topics discussed include the relationship of comedy and iambus, the world of Doric comedy in Sicily, figures of speech and obscene vocabulary in Aristophanes, comic elements in tragedy, language and cultural identity in fifth-century Athens, linguistic characterizationin Middle Comedy, the textual transmission of New Comedy, and the interaction of language and dramatic technique in Menander. Research in these topics and in related areas is reviewed in an extensive bibliographical essay.While the main focus is on comedy, the diversity of the approaches adopted (including narratology, pragmatics, lexicology, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and textual criticism) ensures that much of the work applies to different genres and is relevant also to linguists and literary scholars.
Greek Comedy and Ideology
Title | Greek Comedy and Ideology PDF eBook |
Author | David Konstan |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 1995-04-06 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0195357698 |
In comedy, happy endings resolve real-world conflicts. These conflicts, in turn, leave their mark on the texts in the form of gaps in plot and inconsistencies of characterization. Greek Comedy and Ideology analyzes how the structure of ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in the society of the classical city-state. It explores the utopian vision of Aristophanes' comedies--for example, an all-powerful city inhabited by birds, or a world of limitless wealth presided over by the god of wealth himself--as interventions in the political issues of his time. David Konstan goes on to examine the more private world of Menandrean comedy (including two adaptations of Menander by the Roman playwright Terence), in which problems of social status, citizenship, and gender are negotiated by means of elaborately contrived plots. In conclusion, Konstan looks at an imitation of ancient comedy by Moliére, and the way in which the ideology of emerging capitalism transforms the premises of the classical genre.
The Play of Language in Ancient Greek Comedy
Title | The Play of Language in Ancient Greek Comedy PDF eBook |
Author | Kostas Apostolakis |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Pages | 538 |
Release | 2024-05-14 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 3111295990 |
Ancient Greek comedy relied primarily on its text and words for the fulfilment of its humorous effects and aesthetic goals. In the wake of a rich tradition of previous scholarship, this volume explores a variety of linguistic materials and stylistic artifices exploited by the Greek comic poets, from vocabulary and figures of speech (metaphors, similes, rhyme) to types of joke, obscenity, and the mechanisms of parody. Most of the chapters focus on Aristophanes and Old Comedy, which offers the richest arsenal of such techniques, but the less ploughed fields of Middle and New Comedy are also explored. Emphasis is placed on practical criticism and textual readings, on the examination of particular artifices of speech and the analysis of individual passages. The main purpose is to highlight the use of language for the achievement of the aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual purposes of ancient comedy, in particular for the generation of humour and comic effect, the delineation of characters, the transmission of ideological messages, and the construction of poetic meaning. The volume will be useful to scholars of ancient drama, linguists, students of humour, and scholars of Classical literature in general.