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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Aesthetics of Darkness: A Study of Hellenistic Romanticism in Apollonius, Lycophron and Nicander

The Aesthetics of Darkness: A Study of Hellenistic Romanticism in Apollonius, Lycophron and Nicander

Sistakou, E.

Paperback

Series: Hellenistica Groningana, Book 17

Literary CriticismAncient Greece

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 9042926546
ISBN13: 9789042926547
Publisher: Peeters
Published: Oct 4 2012
Pages: 311
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.40
Language: English
Darkness in literature manifests itself as a fascination with the evil passions of man, an emphasis on the ugly and the monstrous, an obsession with morbidity and death, a blurring of the boundaries between reality and imagination; its effect ranges from pleasure in the representation of horror to the overwhelming sense of the sublime. The premise that these trends find their most powerful expression in Romantic literature forms the basis for the exploration of darkness in Hellenistic poetry in the present study: Apollonius' Argonautica, a dark romance building around a heroic quest, is read against the background of fantasy literature and the Gothic novel; Lycophron's Alexandra, a dark remake of Kassandra's prophecy, is seen as an extreme paradigm of Gothic aesthetics; Nicander's Theriaca and Alexipharmaca, two didactic poems on snakes and their antidotes, are reviewed in the light of Romantic science and the aesthetics of Decadence. The introduction provides the theoretical framework where key notions are discussed--the fantastic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the uncanny--, whereas the afterword offers an explanation for the parallelism between the Hellenistic and the Romantic era by reference to their ideological and cultural contexts.

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