Reproducing Athens

Author : Susan Lape
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400825911
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reproducing Athens written by Susan Lape and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reproducing Athens written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system.Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

Author : Jacqueline Stevens
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691017143
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reproducing the State written by Jacqueline Stevens and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-08 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People are said to acquire their affiliations of ethnicity, race, and sex at birth. Hence, these affiliations have long been understood to be natural, independent of the ability of political societies to define who we are. Reproducing the State vigorously challenges the conventional view, as well as post-structuralist scholarship that minimizes state power. Jacqueline Stevens examines birth-based theories of membership and group affiliations in political societies ranging from the Athenian polis, to tribes of Australia, to the French republic, to the contemporary United States. The book details how political societies determine the kinship rules that are used to reproduce political societies. Stevens analyzes the ways that ancestral and territorial birth rules for membership in political societies pattern other intergenerational affiliations. She shows how the notion of ethnicity depends on the implicit or explicit invocation of a past, present, or future political society. She also shows how geography is used to represent political regions, including continents, as the seemingly natural underpinning for racial taxonomies perpetuated through miscegenation laws and birth certificates. And Stevens argues that sex differences are also constituted through membership practices of political societies. In its chronological and disciplinary range, Reproducing the State will reward the interest of scholars in many fields, including anthropology, history, political science, sociology, women's studies, race studies, and ethnic studies.

Author : Sviatoslav Dmitriev
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351621440
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Birth of the Athenian Community written by Sviatoslav Dmitriev and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Birth of the Athenian Community elucidates the social and political development of Athens in the sixth century, when, as a result of reforms by Solon and Cleisthenes (at the beginning and end of the sixth century, respectively), Athens turned into the most advanced and famous city, or polis, of the entire ancient Greek civilization. Undermining the current dominant approach, which seeks to explain ancient Athens in modern terms, dividing all Athenians into citizens and non-citizens, this book rationalizes the development of Athens, and other Greek poleis, as a gradually rising complexity, rather than a linear progression. The multidimensional social fabric of Athens was comprised of three major groups: the kinship community of the astoi, whose privileged status was due to their origins; the legal community of the politai, who enjoyed legal and social equality in the polis; and the political community of the demotai, or adult males with political rights. These communities only partially overlapped. Their evolving relationship determined the course of Athenian history, including Cleisthenes’ establishment of demokratia, which was originally, and for a long time, a kinship democracy, since it only belonged to qualified male astoi.

Author : Ian Worthington
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190633980
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Athens After Empire written by Ian Worthington and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When we think of ancient Athens, the image invariably coming to mind is of the Classical city, with monuments beautifying everywhere; the Agora swarming with people conducting business and discussing political affairs; and a flourishing intellectual, artistic, and literary life, with life anchored in the ideals of freedom, autonomy, and democracy. But in 338 that forever changed when Philip II of Macedonia defeated a Greek army at Chaeronea to impose Macedonian hegemony over Greece. The Greeks then remained under Macedonian rule until the new power of the Mediterranean world, Rome, annexed Macedonia and Greece into its empire. How did Athens fare in the Hellenistic and Roman periods? What was going on in the city, and how different was it from its Classical predecessor? There is a tendency to think of Athens remaining in decline in these eras, as its democracy was curtailed, the people were forced to suffer periods of autocratic rule, and especially under the Romans enforced building activity turned the city into a provincial one than the "School of Hellas" that Pericles had proudly proclaimed it to be, and the Athenians were forced to adopt the imperial cult and watch Athena share her home, the sacred Acropolis, with the goddess Roma. But this dreary picture of decline and fall belies reality, as my book argues. It helps us appreciate Hellenistic and Roman Athens and to show it was still a vibrant and influential city. A lot was still happening in the city, and its people were always resilient: they fought their Macedonian masters when they could, and later sided with foreign kings against Rome, always in the hope of regaining that most cherished ideal, freedom. Hellenistic Athens is far from being a postscript to its Classical predecessor, as is usually thought. It was simply different. Its rich and varied history continued, albeit in an altered political and military form, and its Classical self lived on in literature and thought. In fact, it was its status as a cultural and intellectual juggernaut that enticed Romans to the city, some to visit, others to study. The Romans might have been the ones doing the conquering, but in adapting aspects of Hellenism for their own cultural and political needs, they were the ones, as the poet Horace claimned, who ended up being captured"--

Author : Peter Liddel
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019922658X
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens written by Peter Liddel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh approach to the old problem of the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens. Using modern political theory as a springboard, Peter Liddel argues that the ancient Athenians held liberty to consist of the substantial obligations (political, financial, and military) of citizenship.

Author : Kate Gilhuly
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139475282
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens written by Kate Gilhuly and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens, Kate Gilhuly explores the relationship between the prostitute, the wife, and the ritual performer in Athenian literature. She suggests that these three roles formed a symbolic continuum that served as an alternative to a binary conception of gender in classical Athens and provided a framework for assessing both masculine and feminine civic behaviour. Grounded in close readings of four texts, 'Against Neaira', Plato's Symposium, Xenophon's Symposium, and Aristophanes' Lysistrata, this book draws upon observations from gender studies and the history of sexuality in ancient Greece to illuminate the relevance of these representations of women to civic behaviour, pederasty, philosophy, and politics. In these original readings, Gilhuly casts a new light on the complexity of the classical Athenian sex/gender system, demonstrating how various and even opposing strategies worked together to articulate different facets of the Athenian subject.

Author : Johanna Hanink
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107062020
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy written by Johanna Hanink and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account of how Athens invented the notion of 'classical' tragedy during the later fourth century BC.

Author : Edith Hall
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199298890
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Theatrical Cast of Athens written by Edith Hall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of ancient Greek drama, and its relationship to the society in which it was produced. By focusing on the ways in which the plays treat gender, ethnicity, and class, and on their theatrical conventions, Edith Hall offers an extended study of the Greek theatrical masterpieces within their original social context.

Author : Lara O'Sullivan
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004178880
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Regime of Demetrius of Phalerum in Athens, 317-307 BCE written by Lara O'Sullivan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erudite and urbane, a scion of the Peripatos, Demetrius of Phalerum dominated Athenian political life for a decade (317-307 B.C.E.) with Macedonian support. Viewed by some as the embodiment of the longed-for 'philosopher-king', Demetrius has been seen a test case for the interplay of philosophical training and political praxis in antiquity. This book, through a close re-examination of the fragmentary and diffuse testimonia for Demetrius decade, argues that such a view misunderstands his legislative, constitutional and financial reforms, which should rather be seen within the context of Macedonian suzerainty, Athenian self-interest, and contemporary social changes. Such a context also affords a better understanding of the dynamic relations between the Macedonian generals and the preeminent Greek city at the dawn of the Hellenistic era.