Bloomsbury Academic Politics of Form in Greek Literature, The

The general problem of form and politics has an extensive and thorny history in scholarship, debated by thinkers from Georg Lukacs to Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks to Jacques Ranciere. Within classical studies in particular, scholars have long grappled with questions of form, language, and style, and indeed commentaries on Greek and Latin literary texts continue to devote extensive space to these issues. The Politics of Form in Greek Literature seeks to explore the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender). Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences. About the Author Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London, UK. He is author of The Classics and Colonial India (2013) and co-editor (with D. L. Selden) of The Oxford Handbook of the Literatures of the Roman Empire (2015-) and (with Susan A. Stephens) of Classics and National Cultures (2010). He is series editor of Bloomsbury's Ancients and Moderns series.