Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches
Laura Swift and Chris Carey
Abstract
The study of early Greek poetry has undergone a renaissance in recent decades. But the lion’s share of interest has been devoted to melic poetry. The other small-scale poetic forms, iambus and elegy, have been relegated to a lesser position in modern scholarship. However, iambus and elegy were very important in their own right within the performance culture of archaic Greece. They outlived lyric and were also very significant for the development of Hellenistic and Roman poetry and thus for the shaping of later Western literature. This volume devoted exclusively to these two forms seeks to make ... More
The study of early Greek poetry has undergone a renaissance in recent decades. But the lion’s share of interest has been devoted to melic poetry. The other small-scale poetic forms, iambus and elegy, have been relegated to a lesser position in modern scholarship. However, iambus and elegy were very important in their own right within the performance culture of archaic Greece. They outlived lyric and were also very significant for the development of Hellenistic and Roman poetry and thus for the shaping of later Western literature. This volume devoted exclusively to these two forms seeks to make good the deficit in modern scholarly interest. It assembles selected papers from the conference on Greek iambus and elegy held at UCL on 11–13 July 2012, the first conference to focus exclusively on iambic and elegiac poetry, and addresses issue of performance, origins, poetics, definitions, intertextual interactions and reception.
Keywords:
iambus,
elegy,
lyric,
early Greek poetry,
genre,
intertextuality,
reception
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199689743 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199689743.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Laura Swift, editor
Lecturer in Classical Studies, Open University
Chris Carey, editor
Professor of Greek, University College London
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