Drosilla and Charikles

Drosilla and Charikles
Author: Nikētas (ho Eugeneianos)
Publisher: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2004
Genre:
ISBN: 086516536X

Known for its sensitive representation of the enduring love of a young man and woman, Drosilla and Charikles is one of four existing Byzantine Greek novels, and the first one to be translated into English. This Bilingual edition features: Introduction Aids to reading comprehension: Alphabetical list of characters, List of characters by relationship, List of gods and legendary figures, Select places and people Greek text with facing English translation Explanatory notes on the English translation Bibliography.

The Medieval Greek Romance

The Medieval Greek Romance
Author: Roderick Beaton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2012-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134810296

First published by CUP in 1989, The Medieval Greek Romance provides basic information for the non-specialist about Greek fiction during the period 1071-1453, as well as proposing new solutions to problems that have vexed previous generations of scholars. Roderick Beaton applies sophisticated methods of literary analysis to the material, and the bridges of the artificial gap which has separated `Byzantine'literature, in a form of ancient Greek as both homogenous and of a high level of literary sophistication. Throughout, consideration is given to relations and interconnections with similar literature in western Europe. As most of the texts discussed are not available in English translation, the argument is illustrated by lucid plot summaries and extensive quotation (accompanied by literal English renderings). For this edition, The Medieval Greek Romance has been revised throughout and expanded with the addition of an `Afterword' which assesses and responds to recent work on the subject.

The Late Byzantine Romance in Context

The Late Byzantine Romance in Context
Author: Ioannis Smarnakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2024-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040021190

This book investigates issues of identity and narrativity in late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context, covering the chronological span from the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 to the 16th century. It includes chapters not only on romances that were written and read in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea. The volume offers new insights and covers a variety of interrelated subjects concerning the narrative representations of self-identities, gender, and communities, the perception of political and cultural otherness, and the interaction of space and time with identity formation. The chapters focus on texts from the Byzantine, western European, and Ottoman worlds, thus promoting a cross-cultural approach that highlights the role of the Mediterranean as a shared environment that facilitated communications, cultural interaction, and the trading and reconfiguration of identities. The volume will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and students alike, specializing in or simply interested in cultural studies, Byzantine, western medieval, and Ottoman history and literature.

Authors and Texts in Byzantium

Authors and Texts in Byzantium
Author: Aleksandr Petrovich Kazhdan
Publisher: Variorum Publishing
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Professor Kazhdan's approach to the study of Byzantine texts is to see them as works created by humans, for humans and about humans, not as a system of imitative exercises on ancient or biblical topics and styles. When authors reused or adapted older models, he would ask why they did that and argues that in this opposition of traditional language and new content lies one of the keys to the understanding of Byzantine culture. This approach does not exclude the use of the texts as sources for what happened, and these articles demonstrate just how much can, with care, be extracted or deduced. However, his major aim has been to analyse the historical background, the social ideas and artistic approaches of Byzantine authors, as revealed in what they wrote. These authors include literary figures, and there are important studies on the intellectual culture of the later Empire, but the emphasis is more particularly on the often anonymous writers of saints lives and the 8th-10th centuries. The volume ends with an important section of additional notes and references and a detailed index.L'approche du professeur Kazhdan à l'étude des textes byzantins est de les considérer en tant qu'oeuvres crées par des êtres humains, au sujet d'êtres humains et s'adressant à des êtres humains et non en tant que modes d'exercices sur des thèmes et des styles anciens ou bibliques. Lorsque des auteurs ré-adaptaient ou ré-utilisaient d'anciens modèles, le professeur Kazhdan n'a jamais manqué de questionner la chose et d'affirmer qu'il y existe, au travers de cette opposition du langage traditionnel à un nouveau contenu, une des clefs permettant de comprendre la culture byzantine. Ceci n'exclue pas l'utilisation des textes en tant que sources factuelles et ces articles démontrent comment il est possible, avec soin, d'en extraire. Son propos a cependant été tout d'abord, d'analyser les contextes historiques, les idées sociales et les approches artistiques des auteurs byzantins. Parmi ceux-ci se trouvent des personnages littéraires et il y a d'importantes études sur la culture intellectuelle du Bas Empire; mais, l'accent est surtout mis sur les auteurs - le plus souvent anonymes - de vies des saints et sur la période allant du 8e au 10e siècle. Le volume se termine par une importante section de notes additionelles, ainsi qu'un index détaillé.

Amphoteroglossia

Amphoteroglossia
Author: Panagiotis Roilos
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2005
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This work offers the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of the poetics of the twelfth-century medieval Greek novel. This book investigates the complex ways in which rhetorical theory and practice constructed the overarching cultural aesthetics that conditioned the production and reception of the genre of the novel in twelfth-century Byzantine society. By examining the indigenous rhetorical concept of amphoteroglossia, this book probes unexplored aspects of the re-inscription of inherited allegorical, comic, and rhetorical modes in the Komnenian novels, and offers new methodological directions for the study of Byzantine secular literature in its cultural complexities. The creative re-appropriation of the established generic conventions of the ancient Greek novel by the medieval Greek novelists, it is argued in this wide-ranging study, has invested these works with a dynamic dialogism. In this book, Roilos shows that this interdiscursivity functions on two pivotal axes: on the paradigmatic axis of previously sanctioned ancient Greek and--less evidently but equally significantly--Christian literature, and on the syntagmatic axis of allusions to the broader twelfth-century Byzantine cultural context.

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies
Author: Elizabeth Jeffreys
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1053
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199252467

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies presents discussions by leading experts on all significant aspects of this diverse and fast-growing field. Byzantine Studies deals with the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Late Roman Empire, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Its centre was the city formerly known as Byzantium, refounded as Constantinople in 324 CE, the present-day Istanbul. Under its emperors, patriarchs, and all-pervasive bureaucracy Byzantium developed a distinctive society: Greek in language, Roman in legal system, and Christian in religion. Byzantium's impact in the European Middle Ages is hard to over-estimate, as a bulwark against invaders, as a meeting-point for trade from Asia and the Mediterranean, as a guardian of the classical literary and artistic heritage, and as a creator of its own magnificent artistic style.

Global Byzantium

Global Byzantium
Author: Leslie Brubaker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2022-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 100062448X

Global Byzantium is, in part, a recasting and expansion of the old ‘Byzantium and its neighbours’ theme with, however, a methodological twist away from the resolutely political and toward the cultural and economic. A second thing that Global Byzantium – as a concept – explicitly endorses is comparative methodology. Global Byzantium needs also to address three further issues: cultural capital, the importance of the local, and the empire’s strategic geographical location. Cultural capital: in past decades it was fashionable to define Byzantium as culturally superior to western Christian Europe, and Byzantine influence was a key concept, especially in art historical circles. This concept has been increasingly criticised, and what we now see emerging is a comparative methodology that relies on the concept of ‘competitive sharing’, not blind copying but rather competitive appropriation. The importance of the local is equally critical. We need to talk more about what the Byzantines saw when they ‘looked out’, and what others saw in Byzantium when they ‘looked in’ and to think about how that impacted on our, very post-modern, concepts of globalism. Finally, we need to think about the empire’s strategic geographical position: between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries, if anyone was travelling internationally, they had to travel across (or along the coasts of) the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was thus a crucial intermediary, for good or for ill, between Europe, Africa, and Asia – effectively, the glue that held the Christian world together, and it was also a critical transit point between the various Islamic polities and the Christian world.

The Emperor and the World

The Emperor and the World
Author: Alicia Walker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107004772

Offers a new perspective on Byzantine imperial imagery, demonstrating the role foreign styles and iconography played in the visual articulation of imperial power.