Irene J.F. de Jong – författare

In recent decades the study of literature in Europe and the Americas has been profoundly influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms, whether Structuralism or Deconstructionism, Hermeneutics, Reader-Response Theory or Rezeptionsästhetik, Semiotics or Narratology, Marxist, feminist, neo-historical, psychoanalytical or other perspectives. Whilst the value and validity of such approaches to literature is still a matter of some dispute, not least among classical scholars, they have had a substantial impact on the study both of classical literatures and of the mentalité of Greece and Rome.In an attempt to clarify issues in the debate, the eleven contributors to this volume were asked to produce a representative collection of essays to illustrate the applicability of some of the new approaches to Greek and Latin authors or literary forms and problems.The scope of the volume was deliberately limited to literary investigation, broadly construed, of Greek and Roman authors. Broader areas of the history and culture of the ancient world impinge in the essays, but are not their central focus.The volume also contains a separate bibliography, offering for the first time a complete bibliography of classical studies which incorporate modern critical theory.

Herodotus’ Histories can be read in many ways. Their literary qualities, never in dispute, can be more fully appreciated in the light of recent developments in the study of pragmatics, narratology, and orality. Their intellectual status has been radically reassessed: no longer regarded as naïve and ‘archaic’, the Histories are now seen as very much a product of the intellectual climate of their own day - not only subject to contemporary literary, religious, moral and social influences, but actively contributing to the great debates of their time. Their reliability as historical and ethnographic accounts, a matter of controversy even in antiquity, is being debated with renewed vigour and increasing sophistication. This Companion offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of all these current approaches to Herodotus’ remarkable work.

This is the second volume in a series of volumes which together will provide an entirely new history of ancient Greek (narrative) literature. Its organization is formal rather than biographical. It traces the history of central narrative devices, such as the narrator and his narratees,time, focalization, characterization, and space. It offers not only analyses of the handling of such a device by individual authors, but also a larger historical perspective on the manner in which it changes over time and is put to different uses by different authors in different genres. The present volume deals with time: changes in the order of events (analepsis versus prolepsis), the speed of narration (events may be recounted scenically or in the form of a summary), and frequency (events may be recounted once, repeatedly, or not at all).