The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece

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Oxford University Press, Oct 14, 1993 - Literary Criticism - 224 pages
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.
 

Contents

The Poetics of Colonization
3
Translating the City into Text
13
Staging the City
81
Interpreting the Metaphors
157
Appendix
165

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Page ix - Rome GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies...
Page 3 - ... their land is spacious and void, and there are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it, but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.
Page 3 - ... do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have [they] art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.

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