1st Edition
Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature
The essays in this collection explore various various models of representing temporality in ancient Greek and Roman literature to elucidate how structures of time communicate meaning, as well as the way that the cultural impact of measured time is reflected in ancient texts.
This collection serves as a meditation on the different ways that cosmological and experiential time are construed, measured, and manipulated in Greek and Latin literature. It explores both the kinds of time deemed worthy of measurement, as well as time that escapes notice. Likewise, it interrogates how linear time and its representation become politicized and leveraged in the service of emerging and dominant power structures. These essays showcase various contemporary theoretical approaches to temporality in order to build bridges and expose chasms between ancient and modern ideologies of time. Some of the areas explored include the philosophical and social implications of time that is not measured, the insights and limitations provided by queer theory for an investigation of the way sex and gender relate to time, the relationship of time to power, the extent to which temporal discourses intersect with spatial constructs, and finally an exploration of experiences that exceed the boundaries of time.
Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature is of interest to scholars of time and temporality in the ancient world, as well as those working on time and temporality in English literature, comparative literature, history, sociology, and gender and sexuality. It is also suitable for those working on Greek and Roman literature and culture more broadly.
Introduction; I. Out of Time; 1. “Now, Sleep,” Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl; 2. “Untold Times? A Page from Galen,” James Ker; II. Engendering Time; 3. “Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache,” Sarah Olsen, 4. “The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium,” Kate Gilhuly; 5. “Materna Tempora: Gestational Time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay,” Caitlin Hines; III. Shaping Time; 6. “The Politics of Epinician Time,” Nigel Nicholson; 7. “But now…The Temporality of Archaic Invective Poetry,” Kirk Ormand; 8. “Wasting Time with Petronius,” Jeffrey Ulrich; 9. “The Roman Poetics of Decline,” Andreas Zanker; IV. Beyond Time; 10. “Greek Ghosts and Roman Imperial Temporalities,” Robert Cioffi; 11. “Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime (Proto-Gospel of James 18),” Patrick Glauthier.
Biography
Kate Gilhuly is Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens (Cambridge 2009), Erotic Geographies in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Routledge 2017), and co-editor with Nancy Worman of Place, Space, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Cambridge 2014).
Jeffrey P. Ulrich is Assistant Professor of Classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His first book, The Shadow of an Ass: Philosophical Choice and Aesthetic Experience in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press, and he is also co-editing a volume entitled Ancient Narrative and Reader Response with Luca Graverini and Carlo Caruso (Ancient Narrative, forthcoming).
