De Gruyter The Comparative Perspective

Product Description The book is the third and concluding part of the investigation on Submerged literature in ancient Greece and beyond.The book expands the inquiry to a comparative perspective, in order to test the validity and usefulness of the hermeneutical approach in other fields and cultures. The comparative case studies deal with gnostic text, Qumran texts, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Cuneiform Texts, Arabic-Islamic literature, ancient Rome, Medieval China, and contemporary southern Italy. The volume tackles themes and questions relating to author and authorship, cultural translation and transmission, the interaction between orality and literacy, myth and folktale. A particular emphasis is given to anthropological themes and methods. In this vein, the book further explores dynamics of emergence and submersion in ancient Greece, including cultural trends promoted respectively by Sparta and Athens.The volume provides the reader with a wide range of tools and methodological suggestions to reconstruct literary phenomena and cultural processes in a given historical epoch and context, as well as offering new insights for both classical and comparative studies. From the Back Cover Illuminating the ways ancient Greek culture placed different texts at edge of transmission is still a desideratum. This volume on submerged literature is intended as a new hermeneutics to envisage the whole range of texts produced for a socially relevant occasion and to investigate the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of texts from the circuits of production, diffusion, and transmission. The book offers fresh approaches to Greek literature as well as to Greek cultural history. About the Author Manuela Giordano, University of Calabria, Rende, Italy; Andrea Ercolani, CNR, Rome, Italy.