Pindar and the Emergence of Literature places Pindar in the context of the evolution of Archaic Greek poetics. While presenting an in-depth introduction to diverse aspects of Pindar's art (authorial metapoetics, imagery, genre hybridization, religion, social context, and dialect), it seeks to establish a middle ground between cultural contextualism and literary history, paying attention both to poetry's historical milieu and its uncanny capacity to endure in time. With that methodological objective, the book marshals a new version of historical poetics, drawing both on theorists usually associated with this approach, such as Alexander Veselovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg, and on T. S. Eliot, Hans Blumenberg, Fredric Jameson, and Stephen Greenblatt. The ultimate literary-historical problem posed by Pindar's poetics, which this book sets out to solve, is the transformation of pre-literary structures rooted in folk communal art into elements that still inform our notion of literature.

This book demonstrates Pindar's importance for the coming into being of literature as it has been conceived of in the West.

About the Author
Boris Maslov is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He has published many articles on ancient Greek literature and its reception, the comparative history of concepts, and the history of literary theory. He is a co-editor, with Ilya Kliger, of Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics (2015).


Book Information
ISBN 9781107539099
Author Boris Maslov
Format Paperback
Page Count 383
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 560g
Dimensions(mm) 230mm * 152mm * 21mm