Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:26th Jan '12
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Hardback£122.50(9780199231294)
In his extraordinary story of the defence of Greece against the Persian invasions of 490-480 BC, Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and became critical to their interpretation afterwards. Much as the contemporary sophists strove to discover truth about the invisible, Herodotus was acutely concerned to uncover hidden human motivations, whose depiction was vital to his project of recounting and explaining the past. Emily Baragwanath explores the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represented this most elusive variety of historical knowledge. Thus he was able to tell a lucid story of the past while nonetheless exposing the methodological and epistemological challenges it presented. Baragwanath illustrates and analyses a range of these techniques over the course of a wide selection of Herodotus' most intriguing narratives - from those on Athenian democracy and tyranny to Leonidas and Thermopylae - and thus supplies a method for reading the Histories more generally.
Review from previous edition Emily Baragwanath's study of motivation in Herodotus provides a reading of the text that is attentive to detail and subtle, but never loses a sense of empirically plausible processes of composition and reception. * Malcolm Heath, Greece and Rome *
provocative, stimulating, dense, and often brilliant monograph... it deals in a highly original and illuminating way with the relationship between ascriptions of motive and the larger narrative strategies of the Histories. * Michael A. Flower, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
a subtle, meticulous, and very original study. * Carolyn Dewald, Hermathena *
- Winner of 2009-10 Recipient of the Classical Association of the Middle West & South Award for Outstanding Publication Winner of the Conington Prize 2008.
ISBN: 9780199645503
Dimensions: 217mm x 137mm x 22mm
Weight: 488g
400 pages