Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms

Combining New Materialist and cognitive methodologies, Amy Lather shows the different ways in which matter interacted with mind in ancient Greek thought.

Her readings centre on the concept of poikilia, a richly multivalent term in Greek aesthetics that is used to characterise artefacts as well as mental activity. By delineating patterns of interaction between living and inorganic beings through the lens of this aesthetic concept, Lather maps a body of canonical texts onto the new critical terrains comprised by the new materialisms and cognitive humanities and reveals the points of intersection between cognitive processes and the material entities produced by them.

The result is an innovative contribution to both Classics and New Materialism studies, uncovering the intimate and reciprocal interaction between minds and matter as central to ancient Greek aesthetic experience.

This book contributes to the literary-theoretical field of Material Ecocriticism, expanding its chronological remit, and is the first to apply it to Classics. Material Ecocriticism has been described as an exercise in listening – and it is to a series of underrepresented agents (women, nature, the nonhuman) in the poetry of Theocritus that this book urges us to listen. This ‘from below’ reading that allows nature and materiality their agency, that sees objects and the labour behind them, gives a new way in to the paradoxes of Hellenistic pastoral poetry: the urban backdrop to bucolic poetry, the artifice of the locus amoenus. This book reveals a detailed picture of material agency and a diverse cast of characters human and nonhuman in Theocritus’ Idylls, showing that while the poetry might be paradoxical it is not rarefied. And through a dark-ecological reading it highlights the darkness that undercuts the idyll.

Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms

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Materiality and Aesthetics in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry

Theocritus and Things

Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms

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2 results in Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms

Materiality and Aesthetics in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry

Theocritus and Things