Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece

Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece brings together essays by archaeologists, historians, and literature scholars as an interdisciplinary examination of the Greek archaic age. A time of dramatic and revolutionary change when many institutions and thought patterns that gave Greek culture its distinctive shape were formed, this period has become the object of renewed scholarly interest in recent years. Yet it has resisted reconstruction, largely because its documentation is less complete than that of the classical period. In order to constitute and 'read the text' of archaic Greece, the contributors here apply new methods, including anthropology, literary theory, and cultural history, to central issues: the interpretation of ritual, the origins of the hero and its relation to politics, the evolving ideologies of colonisation and athletic victory, the representation of statesmen and sages, and the serendipitous development of democracy. With their interdisciplinary approaches to the archaic period, the various essays demonstrate how completely politics, religion and economics were interdependent in this period; the importance of performance for negotiating social interaction; and the creative use of the past to structure a changing present.