Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity

Description

This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time across a range of genres. Each chapter in this collection places gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars, prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male. Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots, pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time―and its relationship to gender―in ancient texts. It will be of interest to anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender in antiquity. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of contributors Acknowledgments Abbreviations and spelling Introduction I Context II Approaches III Chapters Notes Bibliography Chapter 1 Women’s tangible time: Perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer 1 Introduction 2 Weaving and time in the Iliad 3 Weaving and time in the Odyssey 4 Looms and fabrics as temporal markers 5 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 2 Atalanta and Sappho: Women in and out of time 1 Introduction: experiences of time 2 Atalanta: running out of time 3 Sappho’s version of immortality 4 Gendered present Notes Bibliography Chapter 3 Feminizing aiōn (“life”/“lifetime”) in Pindar’s Epinikians 1 Introduction 2 Aiōn in Pindar 3 Pythian 4 4 Nemean 9 5 Pythian 5 6 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 4 Gendered time and narrative structure in Herodotos’ Histories 1 Introduction: structuring time 2 Time, integrative 3 Time, continuous 4 Time, discontinuous 5 Time, examined 6 Conclusion: telling the time Notes Bibliography Chapter 5 Time and gender in epic quests and Delphic oracles 1 Introduction 2 Sirens’ songs in Homer’s Odyssey 3 A voice at Delphi 4 Gender and time in the writing of Delphic history 5 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 6 Gendered patterns: Constructing time in the communities of Catullus 64 1 Introduction 2 Ariadne and Theseus: circles of revenge 3 Weaving the future: repetition and the Fates 4 Temporal connections 5 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Chapter 7 Delia’s Saturnian day: Gender and time in Tibullan love elegy 1 Introduction 2 Arrested development: youth’s prerogatives in the early Principate 3 Hedging clauses: enjoying the iners vita, “While the Fates allow” 4 Stumbling at the threshold: Delia’s Saturnian day 5 Conclusion: golden ages Notes Bibliography Chapter 8 Eating up time in Ovid’s Erysichthon episode (Metamorphoses 8.738–878) 1 Introduction 2 Tree violation/sexual violation 3 Fathers, daughters and masters 4 Erysichthon, Ceres and Fames Notes Bibliography Chapter 9 Telling time with Epiphanius: Periodization and metaphors of genealogy and gender in the Panarion 1 Introduction 2 Time and gender 3 Epiphanius 4 An excursus on style and the heresiological project 5 Periodization 6 Competing genealogies 7 Orthodoxy as a virgin mother 8 Conclusions Notes Bibliography Chapter 10 (En)Gendering Christian time: Female saints and Roman martyrological calendars 1 Introduction 2 On Roman time 3 On the Christianization of time 4 The Calendar of 354 5 Christian list-making and time 6 The calendar of 354’s female saints 7 (En)Gendering time 8 And in the end … Notes Bibliography Index