Formulaic phraseology presents the epitome of words worn and weathered by trial and the tests of time. Scholarship on weathered words is exceptionally diverse and interdisciplinary. This volume focuses on verbal art, which makes Oral-Formulaic Theory (OFT) a major point of reference. Yet weathered words are but a part of OFT, and OFT is only a part of scholarship on weathered words. Each of the eighteen essays gathered here brings… Read more
Most critics agree that Euripidean tragedy addresses a wealth of political questions, and that it successfully incorporates and engages with a variety of ancient Greek poetic traditions. Nevertheless, these topics and questions have generally been treated separately. In this book, Jonah Radding contends that the political issues addressed in Euripides’s tragedies are inextricably related to his employment of choral lyric genres such as paean and epinician, and to his engagement with canonical poetic texts such… Read more
Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different options for performative pause—a phonetic phenomenon evidenced by phonology. From the ubiquitous compositional pauses in sense and metrical surface structure, Audible… Read more
In this groundbreaking study, Smaro Nikolaidou-Arampatzi analyzes the direct and indirect evidence of Euripides’ fragmentary play, the Ino, and reexamines matters of reconstruction and interpretation. This work is a full-scale commentary on Euripides’ Ino, with a new arrangement of the fragments, an English translation in prose, and an extensive bibliography. Nikolaidou-Arampatzi argues that the axial point in the play is Ino’s filicide. Hyginus’ Fabula 4, entitled Ino Euripidis, recounts how, after her forced return from… Read more
José Luis Melena Jiménez is a peerless scholar of editing the texts written in the Mycenaean writing system of the late second millennium BCE and explicating their linguistic and “historical” contents. This volume takes up problems of script and language representation and textual interpretation, ranging from the use of punctuation markers and numbers in the Linear B tablets and the values of specific signs, to personal names and place names… Read more
This text first considers the character of Penelope from the Odyssey as the object of male gazes and as a subject acting from her own desire, and then it develops the notion of “possible plots” as structures in the poem that co-exist with the plots Penelope actually plays out. “This book explores Homer’s construction of the character of Penelope, and his more general theory of poetic production and reception. Read more
Nostos, Nestor: a theme, a character. What connects them? The concept of return, underlying the etymology of the oldest Homeric hero’s name, which will be further explored throughout this volume. In the trajectory of Douglas Frame as a researcher, νόστος, νόος, and Nestor summarize more than thirty years of walking with Homer… — From the Introduction… Read more
Ancient scholarship had many faces, but most have faded away over time. Demetrios of Scepsis is one of the more shadowy of these lost figures, best known for his commentary on the Trojan Catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad. Alexandra Trachsel’s work represents the first treatment dedicated to Demetrios of Scepsis in over a century. Because of the incomplete transmission of Demetrios’s work, Trachsel necessarily focuses on the way later readers… Read more
In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, two pioneering scholars of oral poetry, conducted adventurous fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania, collecting singularly important examples of Albanian epic song. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs presents these materials, which have not previously been published, for the first time. Nicola Scaldaferri and his collaborators provide a complete catalogue of the Albanian texts and recordings collected by Parry and Lord; a selection… Read more
Gregory Nagy Translated into Persian by Farnoosh Shamsian [[This article was first published in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (ed. T. O. Sloane; Oxford 2001) 532-538. It is currently available in English here: https://chs.harvard.edu/curated-article/gregory-nagy-orality-and-literacy/.]] شفاهیّت و کتبیّت گرگوری ناژ برگردان فارسی: فرنوش شمسیان مفهوم شفاهیّت [1] از توصیف قومشناسانهی شعر شفاهی [2] به طور خاص و همچنین سنت شفاهی… Read more
