The Emergence of the Lyric Canon

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Oxford University Press, Apr 25, 2019 - Canon (Literature) - 368 pages
The Hellenistic period was an era of literary canons, of privileged texts and collections. One of the most stable of these consisted of the nine (rarely ten) lyric poets: whether the selection was based on poetic quality, popularity, or the availability of texts in the Library of Alexandria, the Lyric Canon offers a valuable and revealing window on the reception and survival of lyric in antiquity.

This volume explores the complexities inherent in the process by which lyric poetry was canonized, and discusses questions connected with the textual transmission and preservation of lyric poems from the archaic period through to the Hellenistic era. It firstly contextualizes lyric poetry geographically, and then focuses on a broad range of sources that played a critical role in the survival of lyric poetry - in particular, comedy, Plato, Aristotle's Peripatetic school, and the Hellenistic scholars - to discuss the reception of the nine canonical lyric poets and their work. By exploring the ways in which fifth- and fourth-century sources interpreted lyric material, and the role they played both in the scholarly work of the Alexandrians and in the creation of what we conventionally call the Hellenistic Lyric Canon, it elucidates what can be defined as the prevailing pattern in the transmission of lyric poetry, as well as the place of Bacchylides as a puzzling exception to this norm. The overall discussion conclusively demonstrates that the canonizing process of the lyric poets was already at work from the fifth century BC and that it is reflected both in the evaluation of lyric by fourth-century thinkers and in the activities of the Hellenistic scholars in the Library of Alexandria.

 

Contents

The Lyric Canon
1
The World of Lyric Local PanHellenic and Athenian
23
The Canonical Nine on the Comic Stage
59
Plato Poetry and the Lyric Nine
95
The Peripatos Aristotles Project on Greek Culture
133
Towards a Written Text
171
The Hellenistic Era Lyric Texts and the Lyric Canon
213
The Paradox of Bacchylides
255
Conclusion
281
Bibliography
291
Index Locorum
321
General Index
326
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Theodora A. Hadjimichael, WIRL Marie Sk?odowska-Curie COFUND Fellow, University of Warwick

Theodora A. Hadjimichael is WIRL Marie Sk?odowska-Curie COFUND Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. She previously held fellowships at Radboud University, Nijmegen in the Netherlands and at LMU Munich in Germany, and taught at the Open University of Cyprus. Her research focuses on Greek lyric poetry and its reception in antiquity as well as on ancient literary and cultural history.

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