Cosmology and the Polis (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781107009271)

This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure and uncovers various such chronotopes in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual, and monetised exchange. In particular, the tragedies of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth.

Author: Richard Seaford
ISBN-10: 1107009278
ISBN-13: 9781107009271
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/12/2012
Pages: 380
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.20w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2012