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The Scroll and the Marble

Studies in Reading and Reception in Hellenistic Poetry

Peter Bing author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Michigan Press

Published:5th May '09

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The Scroll and the Marble cover

"One of the most prominent figures in American Hellenistic poetry scholarship, Peter Bing has long served as a model for acute criticism and careful reading. He has a marvelous ability to make readers rethink their preconceptions; his work is always beautifully argued and documented and his writing style is a pleasure to engage with."
---Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Ohio State University

While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage but in several media---in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing's collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences and how these audiences in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing's essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres---particularly on Callimachus and Posidippus and on epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in The Scroll and the Marble span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole.

Peter Bing is Professor of Classics at Emory University and editor, most recently, of the Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip (coedited with Jon Steffen Bruss).

Jacket illustration: Film still from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures 1939. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

Peter Bing has long served as a model for acute criticism and careful reading. He has a marvelous ability to make readers re-think their preconceptions. - Ben Acosta-Hughes, Associate Professor of Greek and Latin, University of Michigan

ISBN: 9780472116324

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

320 pages