Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

Description

This book brings together a collection of original essays that engage with cultural geography and landscape studies to produce new ways of understanding place, space, and landscape in Greek literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The authors draw on an eclectic collection of contemporary approaches to bring the study of ancient Greek literature into dialogue with the burgeoning discussion of spatial theory in the humanities. The essays in this volume treat a variety of textual spaces, from the intimate to the expansive: the bedroom, ritual space, the law courts, theatrical space, the poetics of the city, and the landscape of war. And yet, all of the contributions are united by an interest in recuperating some of the many ways in which the ancient Greeks in the archaic and classical periods invested places with meaning and in how the representation of place links texts to social practices.

Kate Gilhuly is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is author of The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2009). She began her research on cultural geography while a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has published articles on the erotic geography of ancient Greece and is currently at work on a book on this topic. Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is the author of articles and books on style, performance, and the body in ancient Greek literature and culture and is currently completing a book on landscape aesthetics in ancient literary theory and criticism as well as co-editing, with Joy Connolly, the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism.

'... offers a thoughtful, sophisticated investigation ...' M. J. Johnson, Choice