Katharina Wesselmann - Böcker

The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.

Lists and catalogues have been en vogue in philosophy, cultural, media and literary studies for more than a decade. These explorations of enumerative modes, however, have not yet had the impact on classical scholarship that they deserve. While they routinely take (a limited set of) ancient models as their starting point, there is no comparably comprehensive study that focuses on antiquity; conversely, studies on lists and catalogues in Classics remain largely limited to individual texts, and – with some notable exceptions – offer little in terms of explicit theorising. The present volume is an attempt to close this gap and foster the dialogue between the recent theoretical re-appraisal of enumerative modes and scholarship on ancient cultures.The 16 contributions to the volume juxtapose literary forms of enumeration with an abundance of ancient non-, sub- or para-literary practices of listing and cataloguing. In their different approaches to this vast and heterogenous corpus, they offer a sense of the hermeneutic, epistemic and methodological challenges with which the study of enumeration is faced, and elucidate how pragmatics, materiality, performativity and aesthetics are mediated in lists and catalogues.