Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

2018 OUP hardcover edition. Unread copy in very good condition. Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and 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 alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while 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. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside 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 aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political 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 expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh. Contents: List of Contributors List of Abbreviations Introduction: Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips PART I: OCCASIONALITY Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric: The Case of Sappho by Giambattista D'Alessio Sailing and Singing: Alcaeus at Sea by Anna Uhlig Materialities of Political Commitment? Textual Events, Material Culture, and Metaliterarity in Alcaeus by David Fearn What is a Setting? by G. O. Hutchinson PART II: CONCEPTUAL CONTEXTS Sappho and Cyborg Helen by Tim Whitmarsh Event and Artefact: The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Archaic Lyric, and Early Greek Literary History by Henry Spelman Hermetically Unsealed: Lyric Genres in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes by Oliver Thomas Polyphony, Event, Context: Pindar, Paean 9 by Tom Phillips PART III: LYRIC ENCOUNTERS Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener by Pauline A. LeVen Lyric Minds by Felix Budelmann Fidelity and Farewell: Pindar's Ethics as Textual Events by Mark Payne Works Cited Index of Passages Discussed General Index.…