Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond

Nagy, Gregory

ISBN 10: 0521558484 / ISBN 13: 9780521558488

Published by Cambridge University Press, 1996

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0521558484I4N00

Synopsis:

This book is a comparative study of oral poetics in literate cultures, focusing on the problems of textual fluidity in the transmission of Homeric poetry over half a millennium, from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece. It stresses the role of performance and the performer in the re-creative process of composition-in-performance. It addresses questions of authority and authorship in the making of oral poetry, and it examines the efforts of ancient scholars to edit a definitive text of the "real" Homer.

From the Back Cover: With Homeric poetry, it is argued that no single definitive text could evolve until the oral traditions in which the epic was grounded became obsolete. In the watershed era of Aristarchus, around 150 BC, the gradual movement from relatively more fluid to more rigid stages of Homeric transmission reached a near-final point of textualization.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket