Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists and Biography

Hardback

Main Details

Title Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists and Biography
Authors and Contributors      Edited by Richard Fletcher
Edited by Johanna Hanink
SeriesCambridge Classical Studies
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:380
Dimensions(mm): Height 223,Width 145
Category/GenreAncient and classical art BCE to c 500 CE
ISBN/Barcode 9781107159082
ClassificationsDewey:938
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations 6 Line drawings, black and white

Publishing Details

Publisher Cambridge University Press
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publication Date 21 November 2016
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures. Work in the last decades has emphasized the likely fictionality of nearly all of the ancient evidence about the lives of poets, as well as of other artists and intellectuals; this book now sets out to show what we might nevertheless still do with the rich surviving testimony for 'creative lives' - and the evidence that those traditions still shape how we narrate modern lives too.

Author Biography

Richard Fletcher is Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and the dynamic between Classics and contemporary art. He is the author of Apuleius' Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014) and is co-editor, with Wilson Shearin, of The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy (forthcoming). Johanna Hanink is Assistant Professor of Classics and Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University. She has published widely on ancient traditions about the Athenian tragedians, which also feature in her 2014 monograph Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy (Cambridge, 2014).

Reviews

'Overall it is a study in receptions, and frequently the reception of receptions as audiences of one period or culture layer impressions upon those of their predecessors.' Eleanor Winsor Leach, Bryn Mawr Classical Review