Theocritus

Space, Absence, and Desire

William G. Thalmann (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2023
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-763655-8 (ISBN)

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Theocritus: Space, Absence, and Desire discusses many of Theocritus's Idylls with emphasis on how these poems construct space--its contours and borders, along with the people, animals, and objects that fill it--and the equally important role of absence. Drawing on spatial theory from anthropology and cultural geography, author William G. Thalmann studies each poem in itself and in its connections with other poems, so that a loose coherence emerges among them. Spatially, the Ptolemaic empire provides a setting and reference point for the various types of Idylls (bucolic, urban, mythological, and encomiastic poems), in ways that help legitimate it. In all the idylls, however, space is constructed selectively from particular perspectives, so that it reflects and shapes people's relations with each other and humans' relations with nature. The bucolic Idylls in particular raise questions about being in and out of place and relations between self and other that would have been important under the conditions of mobility and intercultural contact in the early Hellenistic period. Yet theirs is a fictional world, defined more by its margins than by its center, and visions of fullness and presence of nature are always distanced from the reader. Absence is constitutive of this world, just as absence of the beloved is the precondition for the desire of bucolic characters and prompts their singing. Their desire mirrors the desire of readers for the absent bucolic world that the poems arouse and that keeps them reading.

William G. Thalmann has taught at Yale University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and the University of Southern California, where he is now Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature. He is the author of five previous books on Greek poetry and a number of articles on ancient literature and ancient slavery.

Preface
Introduction
Note on Text and Transliteration

Chapter 1: Theocritean Spaces 1: The Bucolic and Urban Poems
Chapter 2: Theocritean Spaces 2: Mythological and Encomiastic Space
Chapter 3: The Poetics of Absence
Chapter 4: On the Margins of Bucolic
Chapter 5: Conclusion

References
Indexes

Erscheinungsdatum	11.01.2023
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	237 x 163 mm
Gewicht	526 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-763655-1 / 0197636551
ISBN-13	978-0-19-763655-8 / 9780197636558
Zustand	Neuware