Bodies and boundaries in Graeco-Roman antiquity / edited by Thorsten Fogen and Mireille M. Lee.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Fögen, Thorsten.

Lee, Mireille M.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human body--Social aspects--Greece.

Human body.

Human body--Social aspects--Rome.

Human body in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 317 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : Walter de Gruyter, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the Graeco-Roman world, the cosmic order was enacted, in part, through bodies. The evaluative divisions between, for example, women and men, humans and animals, "barbarians" and "civilized" people, slaves and free citizens, or mortals and immortals, could all be played out across the terrain of somatic difference, embedded as it was within wider social and cultural matrices.This volume explores these thematics of bodies and boundaries: to examine the ways in which bodies, lived and imagined, were implicated in issues of cosmic order and social organisation in classical antiquity. It focuses on the body in performance (especially in a rhetorical context), the erotic body, the dressed body, pagan and Christian bodies as well as divine bodies and animal bodies. The articles draw on a range of evidence and approaches, cover a broad chronological and geographical span, and explore the ways bodies can transgress and dissolve, as well shore up, or even create, boundaries and hierarchies. This volume shows that boundaries are constantly negotiated, shifted and refigured through the practices and potentialities of embodiment.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table of Contents

A. Introduction

B. The Body in Performance

Sermo corporis: Ancient Reflections on gestus, vultus and vox

Bodies and Topographies in Ancient Stylistic Theory

Paying Attention to the Man behind the Curtain: Disclosing and Withholding the Imperial Presence in Justinianic Constantinople

C. The Erotic Body

Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato's Symposium ∗

Corpus erat: Sulpicia's Elegiac Text and Body in Ovid's Pygmalion Narrative (Met. 10.238-297)

Transsexuals and Transvestites in Ovid's Metamorphoses

D. The Dressed Body

Body-Modification in Classical Greece

"Clothes Make the Man": Dressing the Roman Freedman Body

E. Pagan and Christian Bodies

The Female Body in Late Antiquity: Between Virtue, Taboo and Eroticism

Early Christian and Judicial Bodies

F. Animal Bodies and Human Bodies

Shifting Species: Animal and Human Bodies in Attic Vase Painting of the 6th and 5th Centuries B.C.

Exemplary Animals: Greek Animal Statues and Human Portraiture

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612714627

9781282714625

1282714627

9783110212532

3110212536

OCLC:

635290434