Many-Headed Muse - Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry

This book examines Greek songs composed between 440 and 323 BC and argues for the vividness and diversity of lyric culture.

List of contents

Introduction: definitions, methods, prejudices of reception; 1. A collection of unrecollected authors? The corpus and its problems; 2. New music and its myths: rhetoric, persona, and the theatre stage; 3. Musical lives: reading through the lives of the poets; 4. The language of new music: poetics of compounds and baroque aesthetics; 5. From authority to fantasy: narrative, voice, fictionality; 6. A canon set in stone? Epigraphy, literacy, musical tourism; Conclusion.

About the author

Pauline A. LeVen is Assistant Professor of Classics at Yale University, Connecticut. She has published articles on Timotheus' language, Athenaeus and the reception of New Music, Aristotle's Hymn to Virtue and fourth-century epigraphy, and is now working on a monograph devoted to the anecdote as a narrative and social practice.

Summary

This is the first book-length study of late classical Greek lyric poetry, combining literary-critical engagement with poems and attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. It provides access to little-known texts and fills a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and Hellenistic periods.

Product details

• Authors: Pauline Leven, Pauline A. LeVen
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.04.2017
• EAN: 9781108401661
• ISBN: 978-1-108-40166-1
• No. of pages: 387
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama > Poetry; Humanities, art, music > History > Antiquity; Poetry, HISTORY / Ancient / General, Ancient World, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Ancient history: to c 500 CE, Ancient (Classical) Greek, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Literary studies: poetry and poets, BCE to c 500 CE