• 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
Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece

Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773534490
ISBN13: 9780773534490
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Dec 15 2008
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

By considering women's voices in performance, Anne Klinck provides a new perspective on women's writing. She shows that our understanding of femininity in ancient Greece can be expanded by going beyond poetry composed by women poets like Sappho to explore girls' and women's choral songs from the archaic period, songs for female choruses and characters in tragedy, and lyrical representations of women's rituals and cults.

Through a balanced discussion of poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of woman's song as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors, Klinck demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by skilful male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets.

Arranged in more-or-less chronological order, the chapters contain three sections: an introduction to the author(s), poems or passages in the original Greek accompanied by line-for-line translations in free verse, and notes elucidating the text, its provenance, allusions, and textual difficulties. Beginning with Alcman, going on to Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, other lyric poets, lyric in the drama, and then the Hellenistic poets Nossis, Theocritus, and Bion, Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece traces the evolution of female-voice lyric from 600 to 100 BCE.

Also in

General Poetry