Julia Weitbrecht – författare

How is the history of antiquity told, and what is the role of narrativity in transforming the image of antiquity? This volume addresses the highly charged intersection between experience, narrative, and history that may be apprehended when we consider the great diversity of narrative practices in literature, the visual arts, and historiography. In this study, narrativity is conceptualized as a particular way of inventing meaning by creating coherency through retrospective reorganization. Particularly in relation to antiquity, narratives may be used to establish historical continuity by filling in caesuras and by creating transitions and connections. Individual chapters explore transformations in the imagery, content, stories, and narrative modes of antiquity as they were appropriated in medieval and early modern chronicles, images, and epics. They investigate the forms, modes, and functions of such appropriation and examine the conditions that help explain the particular narrative transformations occurring in the different genres and media that are examined.

Although Antiquity itself has been intensively researched, together with its reception, to date this has largely happened in a compartmentalized fashion. This series presents for the first time an interdisciplinary contextualization of the productive acquisitions and transformations of the arts and sciences of Antiquity in the slow process of the European societies constructing a scientific system and their own cultural identity, a process which started in the Middle Ages and has continued up to the Modern Age.The series is a product of work in the Collaborative Research Centre “Transformations of Antiquity” and the “August Boeckh Centre of Antiquity” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Their individual projects examine transformational processes on three levels in particular ‒ the constitutive function of Antiquity in the formation of the European knowledge society, the role of Antiquity in the genesis of modern cultural identities and self-constructions, and the forms of reception in art, literature, translation and media._x000D_