Overview

Life / Afterlife traces the development, evolution, and uses of underworld scenes in ancient Greek literature and society. Underworld scenes are a unique form of embedded storytelling, appearing across time and genres. These scenes employ a special register of language that acts as a narrative space outside of chronological time and everyday reality. Suzanne Lye shows how writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Plato, and Lucian, among others, used afterlife depictions as commentaries to communicate a call to action for their audiences in response to cultural, religious, and political changes to their worlds. Using networks of underworld scenes which often featured mythic and historical figures, authors could reinforce or challenge traditional religious and cultural beliefs and practices by presenting the long-term, cosmic effects of actions in life on an individual's post-death experience. From ancient to modern times, underworld scenes have helped authors and audiences define the essential qualities of a ""good life"" for different social, political, and religious groups and their societies. This book offers an approach to reading underworld scenes that explains how they function and why they have persisted in various forms, both literary and artistic, from the eighth-century B.C.E. to the present day.

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9780197690208

Table of Contents

Reviews

Lye's hypertextual approach provides rich insights into Underworld scenes in Greek literature, deftly combining innovative theoretical methodology with careful close readings of particular scenes. She shows how authors create meaning in conjunction with their readers by crafting their accounts to enable links with the traditional elements of Underworld scenes, making a nexus with other tellings familiar to their audiences. Specialists and students alike will benefit from this excellent study. * Radcliffe Edmonds, Bryn Mawr College * This is an ambitious study that discusses the Underworld as a theme across different times, genres, and media. It successfully challenges earlier readings that only focus on specific scenes and invites a comprehensive reading of the Underworld scenes in their evolving and interconnected presence in the ancient Greek tradition. It makes us look at texts and visual scenes in 'partnership' with the audiences and viewers who shaped them, tracing the Underworld landscape as a productive imaginary to think with. * Andromache Karanika, University of California, Irvine * Mortal life, as Homeric epic would have us understand, derives its meaning from its limits. It has value because it cannot be replaced. The way we imagine existence after death can be fundamental in helping us appreciate this. And Suzanne Lye has provided us with an irreplaceable guide for thinking through how ancient authors and audiences did this, as well as a template for following her in a similar vein. * Pasts Imperfect * Lye's monograph is an important addition to the study of Greek afterlife, although I see its value more as a reference work rather than a nuanced contribution to scholarship. This is a book that anyone who works on Greek religion in general and the Greek Underworld in particular must read, at the very least as a work that collects and discusses with ease a vast amount of evidence and texts, even if it constantly runs the risk of oversimplification. * , George Alexander GazisBryn Mawr Classical Review * Lye's monograph is an important addition to the study of Greek afterlife…. This is a book that anyone who works on Greek religion in general and the Greek Underworld in particular must read, at the very least as a work that collects and discusses with ease a vast amount of evidence and texts. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

Lye's hypertextual approach provides rich insights into Underworld scenes in Greek literature, deftly combining innovative theoretical methodology with careful close readings of particular scenes. She shows how authors create meaning in conjunction with their readers by crafting their accounts to enable links with the traditional elements of Underworld scenes, making a nexus with other tellings familiar to their audiences. Specialists and students alike will benefit from this excellent study. * Radcliffe Edmonds, Bryn Mawr College * This is an ambitious study that discusses the Underworld as a theme across different times, genres, and media. It successfully challenges earlier readings that only focus on specific scenes and invites a comprehensive reading of the Underworld scenes in their evolving and interconnected presence in the ancient Greek tradition. It makes us look at texts and visual scenes in 'partnership' with the audiences and viewers who shaped them, tracing the Underworld landscape as a productive imaginary to think with. * Andromache Karanika, University of California, Irvine *

Author Information

Suzanne Lye is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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