Centaurs and Snake-Kings
Hybrids and the Greek Imagination
Seiten
2024
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-009-45910-5 (ISBN)
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-009-45910-5 (ISBN)
Combining scholarship with readability, Jeremy McInerney's wide-ranging, stimulating new book uncovers the complexity and potency of ancient hybridity. Hybrids, McInerney reveals, confuse categories and so challenge categorical thinking and underlying certainties. Classical Greek hybrids force us to ask ourselves what separates humans from animals.
Griffins, centaurs and gorgons: the Greek imagination teems with wondrous, yet often monstrous, hybrids. Jeremy McInerney discusses how these composite creatures arise from the entanglement of humans and animals. Overlaying such enmeshment is the rich cultural exchange experienced by Greeks across the Mediterranean. Hybrids, the author reveals, capture the anxiety of cross-cultural encounter, where similarity and incongruity were conjoined. Hybridity likewise expresses instability of identity. The ancient sea, that most changeable ancient domain, was viewed as home to monsters like Skylla; while on land the centaur might be hypersexual yet also hypercivilized, like Cheiron. Medusa may be destructive, yet also alluring. Wherever conventional values or behaviours are challenged, there the hybrid gives that threat a face. This absorbing work unveils a mercurial world of shifting categories that offer an alternative to conventional certainties. Transforming disorder into images of wonder, Greek hybrids – McInerney suggests – finally suggest other ways of being human.
Griffins, centaurs and gorgons: the Greek imagination teems with wondrous, yet often monstrous, hybrids. Jeremy McInerney discusses how these composite creatures arise from the entanglement of humans and animals. Overlaying such enmeshment is the rich cultural exchange experienced by Greeks across the Mediterranean. Hybrids, the author reveals, capture the anxiety of cross-cultural encounter, where similarity and incongruity were conjoined. Hybridity likewise expresses instability of identity. The ancient sea, that most changeable ancient domain, was viewed as home to monsters like Skylla; while on land the centaur might be hypersexual yet also hypercivilized, like Cheiron. Medusa may be destructive, yet also alluring. Wherever conventional values or behaviours are challenged, there the hybrid gives that threat a face. This absorbing work unveils a mercurial world of shifting categories that offer an alternative to conventional certainties. Transforming disorder into images of wonder, Greek hybrids – McInerney suggests – finally suggest other ways of being human.
Jeremy McInerney is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Folds of Parnassos (1999), The Cattle of the Sun (2010) and Greece in the Ancient World (2018) and the editor of A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (2014).
Preface; Acknowledgements; List of figures; 1. Introduction: encountering the sphinx; 2. 'Welcome to Athens'. Theories of hybridity; 3. Hybrids around the corrupting sea; 4. Hybrids, contact zones and margins; 5. Heads or tails: Gorgons, satyrs and other composites; 6. Centaurs and other horses; 7. Snakes and the perils of autochthony; 8. Hermaphrodites and other bodies; 9. Adynata, ethnography and paradox; 10. Conclusions; Bibliography.
| Erscheinungsdatum | 19.08.2024 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | Worked examples or Exercises; 75 Halftones, color |
| Verlagsort | Cambridge |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 179 x 250 mm |
| Gewicht | 860 g |
| Themenwelt | Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Altertum / Antike | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Weitere Religionen | |
| Technik ► Architektur | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-009-45910-4 / 1009459104 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-009-45910-5 / 9781009459105 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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