Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 311 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 458 g
Reihe: Hellenistica Groningana
Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 311 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 458 g
Reihe: Hellenistica Groningana
ISBN: 978-90-429-2654-7
Verlag: PEETERS PUB
Darkness in literature manifests itself as a fascination with the evil
passions of man, an emphasis on the ugly and the monstrous, an obsession
with morbidity and death, a blurring of the boundaries between reality
and imagination; its effect ranges from pleasure in the representation
of horror to the overwhelming sense of the sublime. The premise that
these trends find their most powerful expression in Romantic literature
forms the basis for the exploration of darkness in Hellenistic poetry in
the present study: Apollonius’ Argonautica, a dark romance
building around a heroic quest, is read against the background of
fantasy literature and the Gothic novel; Lycophron’s Alexandra,
a dark remake of Kassandra’s prophecy, is seen as an extreme paradigm of
Gothic aesthetics; Nicander’s Theriaca and Alexipharmaca,
two didactic poems on snakes and their antidotes, are reviewed in the
light of Romantic science and the aesthetics of Decadence. The
introduction provides the theoretical framework where key notions are
discussed—the fantastic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the uncanny—,
whereas the afterword offers an explanation for the parallelism between
the Hellenistic and the Romantic era by reference to their ideological
and cultural contexts.
The Aesthetics of Darkness is a comparative study which combines
the ‘close reading’ of the Greek texts with literary criticism as well
as with specific examples drawn from nineteenth century literature; by
thus transcending the boundaries of conventional scholarship, the book
attempts to capture the Romantic awakenings of post-Classical literature.
