Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art

by Zanker, Graham

• ISBN13: 9780299194505
• ISBN10: 0299194507
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans' defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences. Zanker's exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.

Author Biography

Graham Zanker is associate professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xiii
1. Aims, Approaches, and Samples	3	(24)
2. Full Presentation of the Image	27	(45)
3. Reader or Viewer Supplementation	72	(31)
4. Reader or Viewer Integration	103	(21)
5. An Eye for the New: Poetic Genres, Iconographical Traditions	124	(20)
6. Viewing Pleasure and Pain	144	(27)
Notes	171	(30)
Bibliography	201	(14)
Index	215