Poetry as Performance
Homer and Beyond

This book is a comparative study of oral poetics in literate cultures.

Gregory Nagy (Author)

9780521558488, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 January 1996

268 pages
21.7 x 13.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.321 kg

"In this technical yet clear book, Nagy explores how the Homeric poems, stemming from an oral tradition that can be traced to the middle of the second millenium BCE, became the written texts of today....Rich in detail, knowledge and scope, Nagy's book (the culmination of years of work) offers a lucid, well-argued approach to these problems. It will interest not only specialists in ancient Greek poetry, but anyone concerned with oral traditions." P. Nieto, Choice

To understand the emergence of Homeric poetry as an actual written text, it is essential to trace the history of Homeric performance, from the very beginnings of literacy to the critical era of textual canonisations in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Professor Nagy applies the comparative evidence of oral poetic traditions, including those that survived in literate societies, such as the Provençal troubadour tradition. It appears that a song cannot be fixed as a final written text so long as the oral poetic tradition in which it was created stays alive. So also with Homeric poetry, it is argued that no single definitive text could evolve until the oral traditions in which the epic was grounded became obsolete. In the time of Aristarchus, the gradual movement from relatively fluid to more rigid stages of Homeric transmission reached a near-final point of textualisation.

Introduction: a brief survey of concepts and aims
Part I. Mimesis and the Making of Identity in Poetic Performance: 1. The Homeric nightingale and the poetics of variation in the art of a troubadour
2. Mimesis, models of singers, and the meaning of a Homeric epithet
3. Mimesis in Homer and beyond
4. Mimesis in lyric: Sappho's Aphrodite and the Changing Woman of the Apache
Part II. Fixed Text in Theory, Shifting Words in Performance: 5. Multiform epic and Aristarchus' quest for the real Homer
6. Homer as script
7. Homer as 'scripture'
Epilogue: dead poets and recomposed performers
Appendix
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]