Ritual Poetics in Greek Culture

by Panagiotis Roilos (Editor)

The first book to explore ritual in Greece from cross-disciplinary perspectives, this work offers novel readings of the pivotal role of ritual in Greek traditions by exploring a broad spectrum of texts, art, and social practices. It examines diverse material that ranges from the Homeric epics up to contemporary Greece, through the intervening millennium of Byzantium, thus offering penetrating insights on the topic across chronological and disciplinary boundaries. This unique collection of essays written by an international group of leading scholars in a number of disciplines presents a variety of methodological approaches to secular and religious rituals, and to the narrative and conceptual strategics of their reenactment and manipulation in literary, pictorial, and social discourses. Addressing understudied aspects of Greek ritual, this book will prove significant for classicists, anthropologists, Byzantinists, art historians, neohellenists, and comparatists interested in the interaction between ritual, literature, and cultural structures.

450 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003