Textual Events Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns.

Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within in them, but as well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Felix Budelmann, Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford,Tom Phillips, Supernumerary Fellow, Merton College, Oxford

Felix Budelmann is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He has previously taught at the University of Manchester and the Open University, and his research focuses on Greek literature, especially lyric and tragedy.

Following graduate work at the University of Oxford, Tom Phillips was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College (2013-16). He is currently working on the Leverhulme-funded project 'Anachronism and Antiquity', and his research focuses on lyric, Hellenistic poetry, and ancient scholarship.

Frontmatter
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
1. Introduction, Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips
I: Occasionality
2. Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric: The Case of Sappho, Giambattista D Alessio
3. Sailing and Singing: Alcaeus at Sea, Anna Uhlig
4. Materialities of Political Commitment? Textual Events, Material Culture, and Metaliterarity in Alcaeus, David Fearn
5. What is a Setting?, G. O. Hutchinson
II: Conceptual Contexts
6. Sappho and Cyborg Helen, Tim Whitmarsh
7. Event and Artefact: The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Archaic Lyric, and Early Greek Literary History, Henry Spelman
8. Hermetically Unsealed: Lyric Genres in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Oliver Thomas
9. Polyphony, Event, Context: Pindar, Paean 9, Tom Phillips
III: Lyric Encounters
10. Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener, Pauline A. LeVen
11. Lyric Minds, Felix Budelmann
12. Fidelity and Farewell: Pindar's Ethics as Textual Events, Mark Payne
Endmatter
Works Cited
Index