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Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Online ISBN:
9780191843723
Print ISBN:
9780198805823
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Felix Budelmann (ed.),
Felix Budelmann
(ed.)

Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature

Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford
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Tom Phillips (ed.)
Tom Phillips
(ed.)

Supernumerary Fellow

Supernumerary Fellow, Merton College, Oxford
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Published online:
19 April 2018
Published in print:
22 March 2018
Online ISBN:
9780191843723
Print ISBN:
9780198805823
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

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