Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children's songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes an initiation ritual, arguing that what on the surface may seem like a transition to a new phase reveals other underlying trends that work against the concept of a passage. It further considers how emotion is staged and revisits the poetics of return by looking at patterns such as the eloping, returning, failed, and dead bride. Finally, the theme of separation and return as an exemplification of a distinct female nostos is revisited in female-authored poetry, which helps us decode the complex interweaving of wedding performances and lamentation, among other types of performance.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Fadenheftung
Gewebe-Einband
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 233 mm
Breite: 162 mm
Dicke: 27 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-19-888457-6 (9780198884576)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Andromache Karanika is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She has published articles on Homer, ancient Greek religion and rituals, women's oral genres, pastoral poetry, and the literature of late antiquity and Byzantium. She is the author of Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece (2014). She co-edited a volume on Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome: Representations and Reactions (2020). She served as editor of TAPA (2018-2021) and President of CAMWS (2023-2024).
Autor*in
Professor of ClassicsProfessor of Classics, University of California, Irvine
Introduction
1: The Shadow of a Wedding: Sensing Archaic Poetics
2: The Poetics of Childhood: Wedding, Song, and Performance
3: Returns and Nostoi: Recovering the Experience of the Bride
4: Decoding the Nuptial Poetics
Conclusions
