Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire

2023-12-05 Literary Criticism

Author : Vincent Tomasso
Release : 2023-12-05
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 618/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire by : Vincent Tomasso

Download or read book Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire written by Vincent Tomasso. This book was released on 2023-12-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates how versions of Trojan War narratives written in Greek in the first through fifth centuries C.E. created nostalgia for audiences. In ancient education, the Iliad and the Odyssey were used as models through which students learned Greek language and literature. This, combined with the ruling elite’s financial encouragement of re-creations of the Greek past, created a culture of nostalgia. This book explores the different responses to this climate, particularly in the case of the third-century C.E. poet Quintus of Smyrna’s epic Posthomerica. Positioning itself as a sequel to the Iliad and a prequel to the Odyssey, the Posthomerica is unique in its middle-of-the-road response to nostalgia for Homer’s epics. This book contrasts Quintus’ poem with other responses to nostalgia for Homeric narratives in Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Some authors contradict pivotal events of the Iliad and Odyssey, such as the first-century orator Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Speech, which claims that the Trojan hero Hector did not in fact die, contrary to the Iliad’s account. Others re-created Homeric narratives but did not contradict them, improvising some elements and adding others. Quintus strikes a compromise in his epic, re-imagining Homeric narrative by introducing new characters and scenarios, while at the same time retaining the Iliad and Odyssey’s aesthetics. Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire is of interest to students and scholars working on Homeric reception and the Greek literature of the Roman Empire, as well as those interested in classical literature and reception more broadly.

Postcolonial Nostalgias

2010-11-17 Literary Criticism

Author : Dennis Walder
Release : 2010-11-17
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 218/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Postcolonial Nostalgias by : Dennis Walder

Download or read book Postcolonial Nostalgias written by Dennis Walder. This book was released on 2010-11-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries. Often seen as merely escapist, nostalgia also offers solace and self-understanding for those displaced by the larger movements of our time. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world — and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of ‘Bushman’ song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF

2009-09-01 Body, Mind & Spirit

Author : Laurel Kendall
Release : 2009-09-01
Genre : Body, Mind & Spirit
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 430/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF by : Laurel Kendall

Download or read book Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF written by Laurel Kendall. This book was released on 2009-09-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. This enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing. For most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals express these through the longings of the dead and the playful antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for imported whiskey. No other book-length study captures the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s, endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium. She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance, healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and consumption will find much of interest here.

Imperial Nostalgias

2013 American poetry

Author : Joshua Edwards
Release : 2013
Genre : American poetry
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 869/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Imperial Nostalgias by : Joshua Edwards

Download or read book Imperial Nostalgias written by Joshua Edwards. This book was released on 2013. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS is the second collection by poet and translator Joshua Edwards. Written in Mexico, China, Germany, Nicaragua, and during a train trip around the U.S. and Canada, the book reckons with itinerancy, innocence, and American privilege, while pointing toward a strange horizon. "'Through a turnstile, past a diorama / of ruins, into the ruins themselves, ' Joshua Edwards escorts us into the desert of the real in his haunting and prismatic second collection, IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS. Deepening the archaeological excavation--or is it a salvage operation?--of his first book, CAMPECHE, Edwards brushes the dust from the remains of history, desire, and nostalgia itself, to reveal 'ruins as diorama, ruins as sculpture, / birds as music boxes. Everything / moves toward metaphor and dream.' A breathtaking cascade of parables, images, lyrics, and aphorisms, IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS is necessary work, and required reading for anyone who has felt the cold undertow beneath all beauty. 'Life, ' writes this poet, 'is terrible enough without swans.'"--Srikanth Reddy Symbolic gestures feel bound not by referential expression, but by mystery and drama. If all languages are essentially alike, then softness or firmness is a matter of tissues in which blood takes a clausal complement. Taste for etymology, however, comes from the poetry of crucial decision making, fruit in one hand and broad-bladed knife in the other.

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