Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

About the Author
Felix Budelmann is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He has previously taught at the University of Manchester and the Open University, and his research focuses on Greek literature, especially lyric and tragedy. Following graduate work at the University of Oxford, Tom Phillips was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College (2013-16). He is currently working on the Leverhulme-funded project 'Anachronism and Antiquity', and his research focuses on lyric, Hellenistic poetry, and ancient scholarship.

Reviews
[I] was impressed with the clarity and utility of the concept of textual events editors Budelmann and Phillips present ... [this book] offers its readers a cautious methodological synthesis with an astonishing degree of flex and sway ... form[s] an impressive and clarion whole. * Dennis R. Alley, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198805823
Author Felix Budelmann
Format Hardback
Page Count 328
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 148mm * 27mm