Peter Meineck – författare

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

By connecting our modern heroes to the archetypes of ancient myth, Peter Meineck's marvelous book bestows thrilling contemporary resonance upon those bygone legends. Christopher Markus, coscreenwriter of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame

What connects Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of transformation, and Spider-Man, a modern-day superhero?

Since its inception, Marvel has createdin comics and on the silver screena vast, intricate universe brimming with superheroes and superhumans. Yet Marvel exists in a much larger mythological tradition, one that dates back to the ancient Greeks and their tales of gods and heroes.

Professor of Classics Peter Meineck embarks on a captivating pilgrimage through ancient Greek mythology through the lens of some of Marvel's most iconic characters, including Captain America, Wolverine, and Black Widow, and traces their lineage to the dawn of human culture. Some connections are astounding and eye-opening, like Black Panther's ties to the legend of Atlantis and Daredevil's relationship to the mighty Herakles, while others are uncanny in their resemblance. What, for example, do Scarlet Witch and the sorceress Medea have in common? As grieving mothers cast out from society, quite a lot, actually.

As Meineck reintroduces ancient figures like Achilles and Odysseus, he demonstrates how themes that appeared in the likes of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey continue to emerge in our stories today. He explores why these tales endure and how they have shifted to reflect society's changing values. Through his endeavor, one important question arises: What do our modern myths say about us?

A fascinating and entertaining read, Tony Stark, Odysseus, and the Myths Behind Marvel is a rollicking journey from the legends of old to the pop-culture stories of today.

Theatrocracy is a book about the power of the theatre, how it can affect the people who experience it, and the societies within which it is embedded. It takes as its model the earliest theatrical form we possess complete plays from, the classical Greek theatre of the fifth century BCE, and offers a new approach to understanding how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural, and political force, inspiring and being influenced by revolutionary developments in political engagement and citizen discourse. Key performative elements of Greek theatre are analyzed from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as embodied, live, enacted events, with new approaches to narrative, space, masks, movement, music, words, emotions, and empathy. This groundbreaking study combines research from the fields of the affective sciences – the study of human emotions – including cognitive theory, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, and cognitive archaeology, with classical, theatre, and performance studies.

This book revisits what Plato found so unsettling about drama – its ability to produce a theatrocracy, a "government" of spectators – and argues that this was not a negative but an essential element of Athenian theatre. It shows that Athenian drama provided a place of alterity where audiences were exposed to different viewpoints and radical perspectives. This perspective was, and is, vital in a freethinking democratic society where people are expected to vote on matters of state. In order to achieve this goal, the theatre offered a dissociative and absorbing experience that enhanced emotionality, deepened understanding, and promoted empathy. There was, and still is, an urgent imperative for theatre.

Theatrocracy is a book about the power of the theatre, how it can affect the people who experience it, and the societies within which it is embedded. It takes as its model the earliest theatrical form we possess complete plays from, the classical Greek theatre of the fifth century BCE, and offers a new approach to understanding how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural, and political force, inspiring and being influenced by revolutionary developments in political engagement and citizen discourse. Key performative elements of Greek theatre are analyzed from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as embodied, live, enacted events, with new approaches to narrative, space, masks, movement, music, words, emotions, and empathy. This groundbreaking study combines research from the fields of the affective sciences – the study of human emotions – including cognitive theory, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, and cognitive archaeology, with classical, theatre, and performance studies.

This book revisits what Plato found so unsettling about drama – its ability to produce a theatrocracy, a "government" of spectators – and argues that this was not a negative but an essential element of Athenian theatre. It shows that Athenian drama provided a place of alterity where audiences were exposed to different viewpoints and radical perspectives. This perspective was, and is, vital in a freethinking democratic society where people are expected to vote on matters of state. In order to achieve this goal, the theatre offered a dissociative and absorbing experience that enhanced emotionality, deepened understanding, and promoted empathy. There was, and still is, an urgent imperative for theatre.

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world.

Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.

This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.