The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780195083996)

Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continue to be told and retold long after the colonies themselves were settled, and this book explores how the ancient Greeks constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Greek stories about colonizing Sicily or the Black Sea in the seventh century B.C.E. are no more transparent, no less culturally constructed than nineteenth-century British tales of empire in India or Africa; they are every bit as much about power, language, and cultural appropriation. This book brings anthropological and literary theory to bear on the narratives that later Greeks tell about founding colonies and the processes through which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story-lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of the Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world settlement.

Author: Carol Dougherty
ISBN-10: 0195083997
ISBN-13: 9780195083996
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 10/14/1993
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.36h x 6.38w x 0.80d