The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual

The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual addresses the various modes of interaction between ancient Greek lyric poetry and the visual arts as well as more general notions of visuality. It covers diverse poetic genres in a range of contexts radiating outwards from the original performance(s) to encompass their broader cultural settings, the later reception of the poems, and finally also their understanding in modern scholarship. By focusing on the relationship between the visual and the verbal as well as the sensory and the mental, this volume raises a wide range of questions concerning human perception and cultural practices. As this collection of essays shows, Greek lyric poetry played a decisive role in the shaping of both.

Vanessa Cazzato, DPhil (2011), Oxford University, is a post-doctoral researcher at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her main fields of interest are Greek lyric poetry (especially solo song) and tragedy.

André Lardinois, Ph.D. (1995), Princeton University, is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His main fields of interest are archaic Greek poetry and classical drama. He has published extensively on Sappho.

Contributors are: Lucia Athanassaki, Anton Bierl, Michel Briand, Claude Calame, Jesús Carruesco, Vanessa Cazzato, Gregory S. Jones, Ippokratis Kantzios, Katerina Ladianou, Laura Lulli, Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Deborah Steiner, Jenny Strauss Clay, Laura Swift, Caroline Trieschnigg.

"This volume is a substantial and welcome addition to the burgeoning field of ancient sensory studies. As a conference proceedings of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song, it vividly illustrates (as befits a study of vision) how traditional methods of analyzing Greek lyric can be fruitfully applied to new questions: here, the role and nature of sight and spectator in the lyric corpus. (...) Given this concentration on visuality as both an embodied practice as well as a feature of poetics, this volume is also richly interdisciplinary. Numerous essays put lyric texts into dialogue with sculpture, architecture, and painting in order to contextualize lyric within a broader visual culture, and this is one of the great strengths of the collection.(...) All in all, this volume comprises an invaluable resource for scholars of archaic and classical lyric and art and will prove equally useful for anyone interested in visual dynamics in the ancient world. The bibliography for each essay is thorough and up to date, further bolstering the work's utility." Amy Lather, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.02.38