Preposterous Poetics

Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College. He is one of the best-known writers on Greek literature and cultures, publishing almost twenty books and numerous articles on texts and topics from the whole span of antiquity and its reception, especially in the Victorian era. He has broadcast regularly on television and radio around the world, and has been profiled in newspapers from Brazil to Australia. His books have won three international prizes and been translated into ten languages.

'A playful book, brimming with merriment in its stories and curiosities .' Kate Cooper, The Times Literary Supplement

• 1. Forms of attention: time and narrative in Ecphrasis; 2. When size matters: erotics, the epyllion, and Colluthus' Rape of Helen; 3. In the beginning; 4. Preposterous poetics and the erotics of death; 5. Strange dogs: Joseph and Aseneth and the dynamics of transformation; 6. Life forms: biography and rabbinical writing coda; Acknowledgements; Bibliography. Index.