No ancient poet has a wider following today than Sappho; her status as the most famous woman poet from Greco-Roman antiquity, and as one of the most prominent lesbian voices in history, has ensured a continuing fascination with her work down the centuries. The Cambridge Companion to Sappho provides an up-to-date survey of this remarkable, inspiring, and mysterious Greek writer, whose poetic corpus has been significantly expanded in recent years thanks to the discovery of new papyrus sources. Containing an introduction, prologue and thirty-three chapters, the book examines Sappho's historical, social, and literary contexts, the nature of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss, and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan. All Greek is translated, making the volume accessible to everyone interested in one of the most significant creative artists of all time.
Author(s): P. J. Finglass
Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 586
City: Cambridge
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Contents
Plates
Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Contexts
Sappho’s Lives
Sappho’s Lesbos
Sappho and Sexuality
Sappho and Epic
Sappho and Alcaeus
Sappho and Archaic Greek Song Culture
2. Poetics
Sappho and Genre
Performing Sappho
Sappho’s Metres and Music
Sappho’s Dialect
Sappho’s Poetic Language
Sappho’s Personal Poetry
Sappho’s Lyric Sensibility
Myth in Sappho
The Gods in Sappho
3. Transmission
The Alexandrian Edition of Sappho
Sappho on the Papyri
Editions of Sappho since the Renaissance
4. Receptions
Sappho in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Greek Literature
Sappho and Hellenistic Poetry
Sappho at Rome
Sappho in Imperial Greek Literature
Sappho at Byzantium
Early Modern Sapphos in France and England
Early Modern and Modern German, Italian, and Spanish Sapphos
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Sapphos in France, England, and the United States
Sappho and Modern Greece
Sappho in the Twentieth Century and Beyond Anglophone Receptions
Sappho in Australia and New Zealand
Sappho in Latin America
Sappho in Hebrew Literature
Sappho in India
Sappho in China and Japan
Bibliography
General Index
Index to the Reception of Sappho
Plates
