Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Masks of Authority: Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Poetics

by Claude Calame , Peter Burk
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹10,321.00
Original price ₹12,386.00
Original price ₹12,386.00
Original price ₹12,386.00
(-17%)
₹10,321.00
Current price ₹10,321.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780801438929
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Cornell University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 280
  • Original Price: USD 89.95
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 472 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Ancient & Classical

Exploring a variety of literary texts representing different poetic genres, Claude Calame, an internationally known classicist, draws the lineaments of a real history of the means used by ancient Greek poets to create in their works a fictional authorship. In this collection of essays, he shows that they made of their poems, through various discursive strategies, texts to be performed, with the collective, ritual, and pragmatic values implicit in the ideas of craft and performance. How is it possible to distinguish between the external context and reception of a discursive work and the elaborate poetic effects produced in the text itself by means of language? Clearly, the partly fictional figure of the author "constructed" by the text is not the same as the biographical author. In ancient Greece, moreover, the person of the composer of a poem was often distinct from the person of its performer.Important examples in Masks of Authority include some of the Homeric Hymns, didactic poetry by Hesiod, a bucolic poem of Theocritus, performed poetry by Sappho and mimetic poems by Callimachus, Attic tragedy and comedy in masked performances (Sophocles and Aristophanes), an iconographic inscription, an authoritative scientific discourse by Hippocrates, and an initiatory commentary to an Orphic theogony. The result is a selective history of Greek poetics from the perspective of its authorial devices and social functions, its place between oral and written traditions.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us