The invention of Athens
Subtitle: the funeral oration in the classical city
By: Nicole Loraux ; translated by Alan Sheridan ; foreword by Laura Slatkin.
Publisher: Zone Books; Distributed by the MIT Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York; Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 539
Subjects: Speeches, addresses, etc., Greek -- History and criticism.; Funeral rites and ceremonies, Ancient -- Greece -- Athens.; Funeral orations -- History and criticism.; City and town life in literature.; Oratory, Ancient.; Athens (Greece) -- Intellectual life.; Athens (Greece) -- In literature.
Description: "In The Invention of Athens, her first book, Nicole Loraux launched her exploration of Greek - and more particularly Athenian - self-representations: in this case, through the funeral oration. Coordinating past, present, and future generations, the funeral oration emerges in Loraux's account as the state institution and genre through which official memory is performed, cultivated, and transmitted. In her anatomy of the institution and genre of the epitaphics, Loraux illuminates the politics, myths, and gendered discourses and institutions of Antiquity. Loraux shows us again and again how the field of representation, particularly as it emerges in a democratic terrain, is the field of contest. Loraux's work was always concerned with the politics of memory - What shall be remembered? And how? And by whom? And for whom? - the way in which the city represents itself, how it constitutes itself, how it remembers and members itself are among Loraux's central preoccupations, and she makes them ours."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.