The Sea In The Greek Imagination

In The Sea in the Greek Imagination, Marie-Claire Beaulieu unifies the multifarious representations of the sea and sea-crossing in Greek myth and imagery by positing the sea as a cosmological boundary between the worlds of the living, the dead, and the gods, or between reality and imagination.

This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the sea was an essential domain for trade, cultural exchange, communication, exploration, and colonisation. In tandem with the lived reality of this maritime space, a parallel experience of the sea emerged in narrative representations from ancient Greece and Rome, of the sea as a cultural imaginary. This imaginary seems often to oscillate between two extremes: the utopian and the catastrophic; such representations can be found in narratives from ancient history, philosophy, society, and literature, as well as in their post-classical receptions. Utopia can be found in some imaginary island paradise far away and across the distant sea; the sea can hold an unknown, mysterious, divine wealth below its surface; and the sea itself as a powerful watery body can hold a liberating potential. The utopian quality of the sea and seafaring can become a powerful metaphor for articulating political notions of the ideal state or for expressing an individual’s sense of hope and subjectivity. Yet the catastrophic sea balances any perfective imaginings: the sea threatens coastal inhabitants with floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes and sailors with storms and the accompanying monsters. From symbolic perspectives, the catastrophic sea represents violence, instability, the savage, and even cosmological chaos. The twelve papers in this volume explore the themes of utopia and catastrophe in the liminal environment of the sea, through the lens of history, philosophy, literature and classical reception. Contributors: Manuel Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar, Vilius Bartninkas, Aaron L. Beek, Ross Clare, Gabriele Cornelli, Isaia Crosson, Ryan Denson, Rhiannon Easterbrook, Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz, Georgia L. Irby, Simona Martorana, Guy Middleton, Hamish Williams.

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus's personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus's tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying instead loss, puzzlement, and despair in the face of the empty tomb. Reading Mark's Gospel as an exemplary text, Thate examines what he considers to be retellings of other traumatic experiences—the stories of Jesus's exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, his stilling of the storm, and his walking on the water. Drawing widely on a diverse set of resources that include the canon of western fiction, classical literature, the psychological study of trauma, phenomenological philosophy, the new materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructural philosophy, and Hebrew Bible scholarship, as well as the expected catalog of New Testament tools of biblical criticism in general and Markan scholarship in particular, The Godman and the Sea is an experimental reading of the Gospel of Mark and the social force of the sea within its traumatized world. More fundamentally, however, it attempts to position this reading as a story of trauma, ecstasy, and what has become through the ruins of past pain.

This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role of the animals in sacrifice and divination. The second part explores the similarities between animals, on the one hand, and men and gods, on the other. Indeed, in antiquity, the behaviour of several animals was perceived to mirror human behaviour, while the selection of the various animals as sacrificial victims to specific deities often was determined on account of some peculiar habit that echoed a special attribute of the particular deity. The last part of this volume is devoted to the study of animal metamorphosis, and to this end a number of myths that associate various animals with transformation are examined from a variety of perspectives.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BURNSIDE When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his obsessions.