Bøger udgivet af Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies

Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord collected singularly important examples of Albanian epic song while conducting fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania. A complete catalogue of their collected materials, Wild Songs, Sweet Songs is an authoritative guide to one of the most significant collections of Balkan folk epic in existence.

Greek Language, Italian Landscape traces the transformation of language ideologies and practices of Griko, a variety of Modern Greek used in the Italian province of Lecce, and proposes the concept of "the cultural temporality of language" to describe how locals are converting what was once considered a "backward language" into a symbolic resource.

Worlds of Knowledge rediscovers the works of authors from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and challenges the frequent focus in travel studies on English-language texts. Written by experts in a wide range of fields, this interdisciplinary volume sheds new light on the range, innovation, and erudition of travel narratives by women.

A reissue of James T. Monroe's classic study on the cultural history of al-Andalus that establishes Spanish scholars on the forefront of European scholars confronting the Orientalism and colonialism at the heart of their national projects. A new foreword by Michelle M. Hamilton and David A. Wacks examines the impact of Monroe's pathbreaking study.

Trachsel's work represents the first treatment dedicated to Demetrios of Scepsis in over a century. She offers a thorough analysis of the ancient and modern reactions to Demetrios's research into the Iliad and the Trojan landscape and provides new evidence about the impressively wide range of other topics Demetrios's work may have contained.

Casey Due, coeditor of the Homer Multitext, explores both the traditionality and multiformity of the Iliad. Due argues this multiform nature gives us glimpses of the very long history of the text, access to even earlier Iliads, and a greater awareness of the mechanisms by which such a remarkable epic poem could be composed in performance.

William Brockliss, responding to George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's analysis of metaphor, explores the Homeric poets' use of concrete concepts drawn from the Greek natural environment to aid their audiences' understanding of abstract concepts. In particular, he considers Homeric images associating flowers with deception, disorder, and death.

Gregory Nagy analyzes metonymy as a mental process that complements metaphor. If metaphor is a substitution of something unfamilar for something familiar, metonymy connects something familiar with something else already familiar. Nagy offers close readings of over one hundred examples of metonymy in the arts of Greek and other cultures.

The once influential theory Neoanalysis held that motifs and episodes in the Iliad derive from the Aethiopis. Given its vast potential implications for the Iliad's origins, the recent revival of Neoanalysis in subtler form inspires this critical reappraisal by Malcolm Davies of that theory's more sophisticated reincarnation.

First published in 1960, The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry-from South Slavic epic songs to the Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, and beyond. This edition offers a corrected text and is supplemented by an open-access website with audio recordings.

This study by Helene Monsacre shows how Western ideals of inexpressive manhood run contrary to the poetic vision of Achilles and his warrior companions presented in the Homeric epics. Pursuing the paradox of the tearful fighter, Monsacre examines the interactions between men and women in the Homeric poems.

The existing manuscripts of Old Norse mythology were written mainly by Christians, obscuring the pre-Christian oral histories. This book assembles comparisons from a range of analytical perspectives-examining the similarities and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures and within the Old Norse corpus itself.

John Curtis Franklin seeks to harmonize Kinyras as a mythological symbol of pre-Greek Cyprus with what is known of ritual music and deified instruments in the Bronze Age Near East, using evidence going back to early Mesopotamia. This paperback edition contains minor corrections, while retaining the maps of the original hardback edition as spreads.

The Art of Reading is the first-long overdue-collection of essays by the French classical philologist and humanist Jean Bollack to be published in English. As the scope of the collection shows, Bollack felt equally at home thinking in depth about both the classics of Greek poetry and philosophy and modern, including contemporary, poetry.

Malcolm Davies provides the first full commentary on the surviving fragments of the four epics that recount the story of the Seven's failed assault against Thebes and the successful assault in the next generation. He sets them in context and examines whether artistic depictions of the relevant myths can help reconstruct the lost epics' contents.

Andrea Capra reconstructs Plato's authorial self-portrait through a fresh reading of the Phaedrus. Capra maintains that Socrates's conversion to "demotic" music in the Phaedo closely parallels the Phaedrus and is apologetic in character, since Socrates was held responsible for dismissing traditional mousike.

Scholars of the literary aspect of Plato try to reconcile his dialogue form with the expository imperative of philosophical argument. Classicists and philosophers explain this form in terms of rhetorical devices serving didactic goals. David Schur brings literary and classical studies into debate, questioning modern views of Plato's dialogue form.

Averil Cameron refutes an argument by some scholars that Christians did not dialogue after a wall of silence came down in the fifth century AD. Cameron shows that in late antiquity and throughout Byzantium Christians debated and wrote philosophical, literary, and theological dialogues, and she makes a case for their centrality in Greek literature.

Between Thucydides and Polybius focuses on the contribution of fourth-century authors such as Ephorus, Theopompus, and Xenophon to the development of Greek historiography. Essays examine the interface between historiography and rhetoric, while undermining the claim that historians after Thucydides allowed rhetoric to prevail over research.

Priene provides a complete picture of life in an ancient Greek city of the late Classical and Hellenistic period. This study presents the first comprehensive look at the architecture of the city, combining material from the first excavation of 1894 and more recent work at the site. It includes redrawn architectural plans and reconstructions.

This book is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahabharata, and focuses particularly on the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak, and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them.

The Derveni Papyrus, discovered accidentally in 1962, is the oldest known European "book." Papers in Poetry as Initiation address many open questions about the papyrus, including its authorship, the context of the peculiar chthonic ritual described in the text, and the relationship of the author and the ritual to the so-called Orphic texts.

Shubha Pathak explores a new way to connect the primary Sanskrit epics Ramaya?a and Mahabharata with their Greek analogues, the Iliad and Odyssey. This cross-cultural comparative study provides a more comprehensive perspective on the poems' religiosity than the vantage points of Hellenists or of Indologists alone.

Heroic Krsna depicts a pre-Hindu superhuman hero who became the divinity Krsna. Drawn from the epic Mahabharata, Kevin McGrath's account of the warrior-charioteer and his friendship with Arjuna explores cultural continuities from the Bronze Age Vedic world and illustrates the pre-divine life of one of the most popular Indian deities of today.

Wareh's study of the literary culture within which the works, schools, and careers of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek intellectuals took shape focuses on the role played by their rival Isocrates and the rhetorical education offered in his school. The book sheds new light on the participation of "Isocrateans" in fourth-century intellectual life.

Exploring the functions of space in the Iliad, Christos Tsagalis shows how active spatial representation in similes and descriptive passages influences characterization and narrative action. He also analyzes Homeric modes of visual memory, implicit knowledge, and mnemonic formats in order to better understand descriptive and ekphrastic passages.

Schwartz's analysis of the Catechetical Homilies of Theodore of Mopsuestia explores the role of education and worship in the complex process of conversion and Christianization. Catechesis emerges here as invaluable for comprehending clergy's ability to initiate new members as Christianity gained increasing prominence within the late Roman world.

In this new interpretation of the Education of Cyrus, in which Xenophon theorized about leadership, Sandridge considers Xenophon's portrait of Cyrus as sincerely laudatory though not idealized. He explores the wider context in which Xenophon's Theory of Leadership was conceived, as well as the problems of leadership he sought to address.

Doak explores how the giants of the Hebrew Bible-which represent a connection to primeval chaos-offer insight into central aspects of Israel's symbolic universe. By placing biblical traditions within a broader Mediterranean context regarding giants and the end of the heroic age, Doak sheds new light on monotheism and monarchy in ancient Israel.

These essays examine a millennium of humorous and satirical writing in the Islamic world. Humor in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish narrative emerges here as a culturally modulated phenomenon that demands examination with reference to its historical framework and that, in turn, communicates as much about its producers as it does about its audience.