Carol Dougherty - Böcker

Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continue to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled, and this book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story-lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of the Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement.

This is a paperback reprint of a hardback originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and derived from a seminal conference held at Wellesley in 1990. Among the scholarly community, the book is generally regarded as the first critical milestone in the cultural poetics movement, which lies at the intersection of New Historicism and classical studies.

The Raft of Odysseus looks at the fascinating intersection of traditional myth with an enthnographically-viewed Homeric world. Carol Dougherty argues that the resourcefulness of Odysseus as an adventurer on perilous seas served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions. The fantastic adventures of Odysseus act as a prism for the experiences of Homer's own listeners--traders, seafarers, storytellers, soldiers--and give us a glimpse into their own world of hopes and fears, 500 years after the Iliadic events were supposed to have happened. In the course of her argument, Dougherty makes liberal use of what we know about Mycenean and archaic artifacts, comparing the realities of historical shipbuilding or weaving, for example, with the often magnificently inflated account of the epics.

Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature brings Homer's Odyssey together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Cormac McCarthy's The Road to produce new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home. While some novels share with the Odyssey a celebration of the creative process of improvisation to rethink the relationship between home and travel, others draw upon nostalgia - our complicated longing for home - to unsettle the inevitability of return. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of Homer's poem, each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody to ask new questions of that well-read text. Does travel reinforce or destabilize our notion of home? Are mobility and domesticity irrevocably gendered, or can we imagine a world in which Penelope travels and Odysseus stays home? Just as Odysseus continually reinvents his own identity with each new encounter, both abroad and at home, so too we, as readers, participate in an improvisatory interpretive experiment of our own. This volume sets out a new model for reading ancient and contemporary texts together - one that challenges the conventional chronological assumptions inherent in many works of classical reception. No longer a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it the same, the Odyssey, together with the novels with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.

With no recent publications discussing Prometheus at length, this book provides a much-needed introduction to the Promethean myth of this rebellious god who defied Zeus to steal fire for mankind.Seeking to locate the nature of this compelling tale’s continuing relevance throughout history, Carol Dougherty traces a history of the myth of Prometheus from its origins in ancient Greece, to its resurgence in the works of the Romantic era and beyond.Offering a comparative approach that includes visual material and film, the book reveals a Prometheus who was a rebel against Zeus’ tyranny to Aeschylus, a defender of political and artistic integrity to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a symbol of technological innovation during the industrial revolution; his resilience and adaptability illuminating his power and importance in Western culture.Prometheus is an essential introduction to the Promethean myth for all readers of classics, the arts and literature alike.

With no recent publications discussing Prometheus at length, this book provides a much-needed introduction to the Promethean myth of this rebellious god who defied Zeus to steal fire for mankind.Seeking to locate the nature of this compelling tale’s continuing relevance throughout history, Carol Dougherty traces a history of the myth of Prometheus from its origins in ancient Greece, to its resurgence in the works of the Romantic era and beyond.Offering a comparative approach that includes visual material and film, the book reveals a Prometheus who was a rebel against Zeus’ tyranny to Aeschylus, a defender of political and artistic integrity to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a symbol of technological innovation during the industrial revolution; his resilience and adaptability illuminating his power and importance in Western culture.Prometheus is an essential introduction to the Promethean myth for all readers of classics, the arts and literature alike.

Originally published in 2003, The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture challenges the conventional perception of ancient Greece as the paradigm for unified models of culture. It offers an alternative view of archaic and classical Greece, one in which the contact, conflict and collaboration of a variety of 'sub-cultures' combine to comprise what we understand as 'Greekness'. This volume argues for the recognition and analysis of cultural contact within Greece, focussing on the micromechanics of cultural exchange, the permeability of cultural boundaries, and the significance of Delphi's geographically marginal, yet symbolically central location as an 'internal contact zone'. Through attention to everyday practices and professions, the essays reveal important ways of conceiving of diversity within Greek culture, ranging from the non-elite culture of athletic trainers to the competing musical cultures at work in fifth-century Athens.