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Poetry and Poetics, Greek and Beyond: Essays in Honour of M.S. Silk

Image of the cover of the book: Poetry and Poetics, Greek and Beyond: Essays in Honour of M.S. Silk
Fiona Macintosh and David Ricks
2025
    About

    This volume honours Michael Silk (1941–), a Hellenist of exceptional learning and critical acumen and a distinctive voice in literary studies, with a range of chapters addressing some of his many interests, reflecting his deep and growing influence over half a century, and marking out areas for ongoing debate and development.

    The 17 chapters address important issues ranging from theory of literature to Greek literature, archaic to classical, the German dimension and classical reflexes beyond Greece and Germany, including the ‘Neo-Latin’ and ‘modern Greek’ cases, and a final section on 'Classicizing in a recalcitrant age'.

    Publisher
    Routledge

    PART A Theory of literature

    1 Literary language and critical values: A dialectic of ancient and modern
    Stephen Halliwell

    2 What’s the meta- with you? Poetic language and metapoetics
    Sebastian Matzner

    3 The animal life of poetry: Variations on an impouvoir
    Vasiliki Dimoula

    4 When ethics and poetics were one: Weltanschauung in nineteenth-century classical philology
    Boris Maslov

    PART B Greek literature, archaic to classical

    5 ‘Language charged with meaning’: Sappho on a dream
    P. J. Finglass

    6 The Thermopylai epigrams again: Herodotos 7.228
    Chris Carey

    7 Billy-goat song: The acoustic effect and etymology of tragōidia
    Edith Hall

    8 Clytemnestra’s handiwork in Aeschylus and Pindar
    Oliver Taplin

    9 Poetics of prose: A case study in Herodotus
    Richard Rutherford

    PART C The German dimension

    10 Myth and ‘metaphysical reach’ in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris
    Matthew Bell

    11 Philology and poetry: The literary legacies of Nietzsche and Rohde
    Bernhard Zimmermann

    PART D Classical reflexes beyond Greece and Germany

    12 Drawing a transparent veil: Sexual euphemism in literature
    William Fitzgerald

    13 Heroism at Troy and Hampton court: Clarissa’s speech in The Rape of the Lock
    David Hopkins

    PART E The language question: ‘Neo-Latin’ and ‘modern Greek’ cases

    14 The quality of humanist Latin literature and the trouble with Neo-Latin
    Andrew Laird

    15 Glossing the modern Greek poetic canon
    David Ricks

    PART F Classicizing in a recalcitrant age

    16 Tragedy refigured in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings
    Justine McConnell

    17 Sublimity at Colonus: From Yeats to Mahon, via Heaney
    Fiona Macintosh

    Michael Silk: A Bibliography