In Imagining Illegitimacy, Mary Ebbott investigates metaphors of illegitimacy in classical Greek literature, concentrating in particular on the way in which the illegitimate child (nothos) is imagined in narratives. By analyzing the imagery connected to illegitimate persons, Ebbott arrives at deep insights on how legitimacy and illegitimacy in Greek culture were deeply connected to the concepts of family, procreation, and citizenry, and how these connections influenced cultural imperatives of determining and controlling legitimacy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Cinema may be called a bastard art in both meanings of the word: because it is usually defined as a hybrid art form, obviously, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it has been able to become formally as well as generically innovative mostly through adulterous relationships, thus making illegitimacy its grounding principle by preferring a blurred lineage to a legible succession. Trying to find what film is referred to in a sequence, therefore, amounts to establishing a clear family tree, which takes no account of the illegitimate unions, natural children and forgotten ancestors that are nevertheless part and parcel of film history. If that quest should still be conducted, its object, it seems, should not be one sole point of reference. The aim of this book is to create the opportunity of studying, and perhaps of rehabilitating, those shadowy corners of cinematographic creation and film memory, and to provide film studies, but also literature and Arts studies altogether, with a newly productive way of using such familiar notions as difference, quotation, reference, blending, hybridity, miscegenation or crossbreeding.