Leslie Kurke – författare

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.

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.

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.

The invention of coinage in ancient Greece provided an arena in which rival political groups struggled to imprint their views on the world. Here Leslie Kurke analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in the archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, she traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the polis, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. The argument thus aims to contribute to a Greek "history of ideologies," to chart the ways ideological contestation works through concrete discourses and practices long before the emergence of explicit political theory. To an elitist sensibility, the use of almost pure silver stamped with the state's emblem was a suspicious alternative to the para-political order of gift exchange. It ultimately represented the undesirable encroachment of the public sphere of the egalitarian polis.Kurke re-creates a "language of metals" by analyzing the stories and practices associated with coinage in texts ranging from Herodotus and archaic poetry to Aristotle and Attic inscriptions. She shows that a wide variety of imagery and terms fall into two opposing symbolic domains: the city, representing egalitarian order, and the elite symposium, a kind of anti-city. Exploring the tensions between these domains, Kurke excavates a neglected portion of the Greek cultural "imaginary" in all its specificity and strangeness.

Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries. Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus.Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel. Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature.