eBook

The poetics of colonization : from city to text in archaic Greece

Dougherty, Carol

1993,1994

Overview

Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continue to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled, and this book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story-lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of the Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Ancient / Ancient & Classical / Ancient Greek History / Ancient history: to c 500 CE / Anthropology / Cities and towns / Cities and towns -- Greece -- Historiography / City and town life in literature / Colonies in literature / Cultural / Greece / Greece -- Colonies -- Historiography / Greek literature / Greek literature -- History and criticism / Historiography / HISTORY / History and criticism / Imperialism in literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / Literary studies: classical, early & medieval / Literature and history / Literature and history -- Greece / Narration (Rhetoric) / Poetics / Rhetoric, Ancient / Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography / Social and Cultural Anthropology / SOCIAL SCIENCE / Textual Criticism / To 1500
• ISBN: 0195083997, 9780195083996