The Cambridge Companion to Sappho

Description

No ancient poet has a wider following today than Sappho; her status as the most famous woman poet from Greco-Roman antiquity, and as one of the most prominent lesbian voices in history, has ensured a continuing fascination with her work down the centuries. The Cambridge Companion to Sappho provides an up-to-date survey of this remarkable, inspiring, and mysterious Greek writer, whose poetic corpus has been significantly expanded in recent years thanks to the discovery of new papyrus sources. Containing an introduction, prologue and thirty-three chapters, the book examines Sappho's historical, social, and literary contexts, the nature of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss, and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan. All Greek is translated, making the volume accessible to everyone interested in one of the most significant creative artists of all time.

P. J. Finglass is Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek and Head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol, and Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. He has published an introductory book Sophocles (2019) in the series Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, as well as editions of Sophocles' Oedipus the King (2018), Ajax (2011), and Electra (2007), of Stesichorus (2014), and of Pindar's Pythian Eleven (2007) in the series Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries; has co-edited (with Adrian Kelly) Stesichorus in Context (2015) and (with Lyndsay Coo) Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy (2020); and edits the journal Classical Quarterly, all with Cambridge University Press. Adrian Kelly is Tutorial Fellow in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and Associate Professor & Clarendon University Lecturer in Classics in the Faculty of Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford. He is the author of A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, Iliad VIII (2007) and Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus (2009), and co-editor (with P. J. Finglass) of Stesichorus in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is completing a Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics commentary on Homer, Iliad 23, and co-editing (with Christopher Metcalf) Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology and (with Henry Spelman) Text and Intertext in Archaic and Classical Greece, all for Cambridge University Press.

'Including a general index (in addition to the reception index) and a very useful bibliography, this volume will be indispensable for all who are interested in Sappho and her tradition and for those working on archaic Greek poetry in general ... Highly recommended.' P. Nieto, Choice Magazine