Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity
Subtitle: Poets, Artists and Biography
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9781107159082
Subjects: Biography as a literary form; Classical biography
Description: "What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures. Work in the last decades has emphasized the likely fictionality of nearly all of the ancient evidence about lives of poets, as well as of other artists and intellectuals; this book now sets out to show what we might nevertheless still do with the rich surviving testimony for 'creative lives'-and the evidence that those traditions still shape how we narrate modern lives, too."--