This open-access volume is the first to explore systematically and comprehensively the concept and category of horror in antiquity. The contributors retrieve the ancient grammar of horror by paying equal attention to its affective and cognitive dimensions, and by looking at it as an embodied, enactive and full-rounded existential experience. They explore how horrifying experiences in antiquity are construed as embodied events while being conceptually rooted in cultural frameworks. They also showcase the ways in which the body itself can turn into a source of deep horror, be it in literary or medical texts and traditions in the Greek and Roman world, from the classical period to late antiquity.
While maintaining a firm awareness of the fact that horror, a largely post-Romantic concept, is not unproblematic when applied to Graeco-Roman antiquity, this collection of studies shows that our Graeco-Roman past can shed substantial light on the ways in which the horrific is understood today, as a category of art but also of life itself.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Exzellenzcluster ROOTS, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Germany).
Recenzijos
This is a wide-ranging collection, dealing with many different aspects of how people might have experienced the emotion of horror in antiquity. Students and scholars with interests in this area will find much value in these pages. -- Tony Keen, Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame (USA), UK
Daugiau informacijos
A conceptual and cultural history of horror as effect, concept, experience and emotion in Graeco-Roman antiquity and beyond.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Embodied Experience, Literary Representations and Human
Knowledge: Horror in Greco-Roman Antiquity and its Legacy
1. Horror Now and Horror Then: Horrors Long Reach from Antiquity to
Modernity and Back Again, Kathleen Noelle Cruz (University of
CaliforniaDavis, USA)
2. Horror in the Odyssey: A Few Notes on Leodes Beheading (22.326329),
Giulia Maria Chesi (University of Humboldt, Germany)
3. The Visceral Thrills of Tragedy: Flesh, Blood and Guts Off and On the
Tragic Stage, Evina Sistakou (Aristotle University, Greece)
4. The Horrific Body in Sophocles, Glenn Most (University of Chicago, USA)
5. Naming the Monster: Forensic Horror and Collective Trauma in Ciceros Pro
Roscio, Sophia Luise Häberle (University of Humboldt, Germany)
6. Fearful Laughter: Bodily Horror in Roman Sexual Humour, Jesse Weiner
(Hamilton College, USA)
7. Cruor in flores mutabitur: Horrific Hybridisations in the Metamorphoses of
Ovid, Aline Estčves (University of Montpellier, France)
8. Landscapes and Bodies of Horror in Senecas Thyestes, Simona Martorana
(University of Kiel, Germany)
9. The Vocabulary of Homicidal Horror in Libanius Against a Murderer, Debbie
Felton (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
10. At the Borders of Horror and Science: The Social Contexts of Roman
Dissection, Claire Bubb (Institute for the Study of the Ancient WorldNew
York University, USA)
11. Overcoming Horror: Numbness and Medical Agents. Some Thoughts on
Medical Horror in Antiquity and Today, Lutz Alexander Graumann
(Justus-Liebig-University GießenUniversity Hospital, Germany)
12. Recipes for Horror in Greco-Roman Magic and Medicine, Sean Coughlin
(Institute of PhilosophyCzech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic)
13. Horror, Writing and Dissection in Sheridan LeFanus In a Glass Darkly,
Arden Hegele (Columbia University, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index rerum et nominum
Index Locorum
George Kazantzidis is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Patras, Greece. He is author of Lucretius on Disease: The Poetics of Morbidity in De rerum natura (2021), and co-editor of Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity (2023) and Medical Understandings of Emotions in Antiquity (2022).
Chiara Thumiger is Research Fellow within the Cluster of Excellence Roots at Kiel University, Germany, and Guest Research Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. She is author of Phrenitis and the Pathology of the Mind in Western Medical Thought (2023), A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (2017) and Hidden Paths: Notions of Self, Tragic Characterization: Euripides Bacchae (2007).
