Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

by: Karanika, A.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

Andromache Karanika

Looks at previously neglected oral tradition genres—such as children's songs—and how they have left traces on surviving literature.
Revisits the old 'rite of passage' idea by looking at ideologies that resist it and how they are present in our literary record.
Makes a case for lost 'genres' from wedding songs to children's songs to early ars amatoria (love didactic poetry) in ancient Greece.

Description
Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children's songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes an initiation ritual, arguing that what on the surface may seem like a transition to a new phase reveals other underlying trends that work against the concept of a passage. It further considers how emotion is staged and revisits the poetics of return by looking at patterns such as the eloping, returning, failed, and dead bride. Finally, the theme of separation and return as an exemplification of a distinct female nostos is revisited in female-authored poetry, which helps us decode the complex interweaving of wedding performances and lamentation, among other types of performance.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1:The Shadow of a Wedding: Sensing Archaic Poetics
2:The Poetics of Childhood: Wedding, Song, and Performance
3:Returns and Nostoi: Recovering the Experience of the Bride
4:Decoding the Nuptil Poetics
Conclusions

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

by: Karanika, A.

• ISBN-13: 9780198884576 / 978-0-19-888457-6
• ISBN-03: 0198884575 / 0-19-888457-5
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2024