The publication of Interaction in Poetic Imagery: With Special Reference to Early Greek Poetry in 1974 inaugurated Michael Silk (1941–) as a Hellenist of exceptional learning and critical acumen, as a strenuous and ambitious theorist of literature, and as a comparatist of wide reach within the Western tradition. The present volume honours this distinctive voice in literary studies with a range of chapters addressing some of his many interests, reflecting his deep and growing influence over half a century, and marking out areas for ongoing debate and development.
The 17 chapters range widely and address important issues in the following areas: theory of literature; Greek literature, archaic to classical; the German dimension; classical reflexes beyond Greece and Germany; the Language Question: ‘Neo-Latin’ and ‘modern Greek’ cases; and classicizing in a recalcitrant age.
Poetry and Poetics, Greek and Beyond: Essays in Honour of M.S. Silk will appeal to scholars and students alike, especially those concerned with poetry and poetics; students of the classical tradition (or, to take a term which Silk disavows, classical reception); practitioners of comparative literary study; and literary theorists.
The present volume honours this distinctive voice in literary studies with a range of papers addressing some of his many interests, reflecting his deep and growing influence over half a century, and marking out areas for ongoing debate and development.
A: Theory of literature
Chapter 1
Literary language and critical values: a dialectic of ancient and modern
Stephen Halliwell
Chapter 2
What’s the meta- with you? Poetic language and metapoetics
Sebastian Matzner
Chapter 3
The animal life of poetry: variations on an impouvoir
Vasiliki Dimoula
Chapter 4
When ethics and poetics were one: Weltanschauung in nineteenth-century classical philology
Boris Maslov
B: Greek literature, archaic to classical
Chapter 5
‘Language charged with meaning’: Sappho on a dream
Patrick Finglass
Chapter 6
The Thermopylai epigrams again: Herodotos 7.228
Chris Carey
Chapter 7
Billy-goat song: the acoustic effect and etymology of tragōidia
Edith Hall
Chapter 8
Clytemnestra’s handiwork in Aeschylus and Pindar
Oliver Taplin
Chapter 9
Poetics of prose: a case study in Herodotus
Richard Rutherford
C: The German dimension
Chapter 10
Myth and ‘metaphysical reach’ in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris
Matthew Bell
Chapter 11
Philology and poetry: the literary legacies of Nietzsche and Rohde
Bernhard Zimmermann
D: Classical reflexes beyond Greece and Germany
Chapter 12
Drawing a transparent veil: sexual euphemism in literature
William Fitzgerald
Chapter 13
Heroism at Troy and Hampton Court: Clarissa’s speech in The Rape of the Lock
David Hopkins
E: The Language Question: ‘neo-Latin’ and ‘modern Greek’ cases
Chapter 14
The quality of humanist Latin literature and the trouble with Neo-Latin
Andrew Laird
Chapter 15
Glossing the modern Greek poetic canon
David Ricks
F: Classicizing in a recalcitrant age
Chapter 16
Tragedy refigured in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings
Justine McConnell
Chapter 17
Sublimity at Colonus: from Yeats to Mahon, via Heaney
Fiona Macintosh
Bibliography of Michael Silk’s publications
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Fiona Macintosh is Emeritus Professor of Classical Reception and Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She was the Director of the APGRD in Oxford from 2010 to 2024 and has published widely on the reception of ancient epic and tragedy in the modern world.
David Ricks is Professor Emeritus, King’s College London, and sometime editor of the journals Dialogos: Hellenic Studies Review and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. He has written widely on modern Greek poetry and on the classical tradition.