Modes of viewing in Hellenistic poetry and art / Graham Zanker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zanker, G. (Graham), 1947-

Series:

Wisconsin studies in classics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Greek poetry, Hellenistic--History and criticism.

Greek poetry, Hellenistic.

Visual perception in literature.

Art and literature--Greece.

Art and literature.

Point of view (Literature).

Description (Rhetoric).

Rhetoric, Ancient.

Art, Hellenistic.

Greece.

Physical Description:

xiv, 223 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, [2004]

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. The author poses and responds to a number of questions: How did Hellenistic Greeks look at visual art? How did they envision the imagery they read in poetry? What were the modes of viewing common to both these forms? When did artists and poets provide rich visual detail, and when did they expect their audiences to mentally "fill in" details by recourse to shared experience or cultural knowledge? 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 themes in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.

Contents:

1. Aims, Approaches, and Samples 3

2. Full Presentation of the Image 27

3. Reader or Viewer Supplementation 72

4. Reader or Viewer Integration 103

5. An Eye for the New: Poetic Genres, Iconographical Traditions 124

6. Viewing Pleasure and Pain 144.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-214) and index.

ISBN:

0299194507

OCLC:

51861801