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The broad objective of this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study uniting historical linguistics, classical philology, and comparative poetics in an attempt to investigate archaic Greek poetic texts from a diachronic perspective. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part, “Etymology and Poetics”, is devoted to several cases where scantiness of attestation and lack of semantic information render traditional philological methods of textual interpretation insufficient. In such cases, the meaning of a word has to be arrived at through linguistic analysis and verified through appeal to related poetic traditions, such as that of Indo-Iranian. Chapter 1 proposes a new interpretation for the enigmatic word ἀάατο̋, the Homeric epithet of the waters of the Styx, which is shown to have meant ‘sunless’. Chapter 2 deals with the word ἀριδείκετο̋, argued to mean ‘famous’: this solution finds support in the use of the root *dei̯k- in the poetic expression “to show forth praise”, found in Greek choral lyric and the Rigveda. Chapter 3 investigates the history of the verbs ἰάπτω ‘to harm’ and ἰάπτω ‘to send forth (to Hades)’. Chapter 4 improves the text of Pindar (O. 6.54), restoring a form ἀπειράτωι. Chapter 5 discusses the difficult word ἀμαυρό̋, establishing for it a meaning ‘weak’ and proposing a new etymology. Finally, Chapter 6 places Alc. 34 in the context of comparative mythology, with the object of reconstructing the history of the Lesbian lyric tradition. The second part, “Grammar of Poetry”, shifts the focus of the inquiry from comparative poetics to the language of early Greek poetry and its use. Chapter 7 addresses the problematic Homeric aorist infinitives in -έειν, showing how these artificial forms were created by allomorphic remodeling driven by metrical necessity; the problem is placed in the wider context of the debate about the transmission and development of Homeric epic diction. The metrical and linguistic facts relating to the distribution of infinitives are further discussed in Chapter 8, where it is argued that the unexpected Aeolic form νηφέμεν in Archil. 4 should be viewed as an intentional allusion to the epic tradition, specifically, the famous midsummer picnic scene in Hesiod. / Linguistics

In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.

Renaissance Error proposes that the formal key to early modern literature is digression. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers compose works that persistently imitate moral and cognitive wandering, often in an attempt to remedy such wandering. Their powerful sense of human error springs from the humanist and reformist view of the Middle Ages as a gigantic detour from classical civilisation and from the apostolic Church. This sense deepens as the intellectual disciplines and religious paths of the Renaissance divide. And it culminates in a radical picture of all human desire, thought, and history as continually digressive from beginning to end.

In this dissertation I offer an analysis of the ideological significance of Juan de Castellanos' writings in light of the epic model provided by Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana. My main goal is to demonstrate that, unlike Ercilla, Castellanos embraced and manipulated the resources at the disposal of epic poets not only to praise the deeds and defend the rights of the first wave of colonists, but also to challenge the policies of Hapsburg monarchs concerning the administration of the recently established Viceroyalties in the New World. Hence, this dissertation aims to foreground the complexities and ambiguities of a text that bears evidence of an internal ideological fissure that significantly shaped Spain’s political and territorial expansion and contributed to the emergence of a new type of literature. If epic, as has been persuasively argued by Elizabeth B. Davis "was invaluable to the ruling circles of the imperial monarchy, who used it to forge a sense of unity and to script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest" (10), then the heroic poems written by Castellanos on behalf of the conquistadors and encomenderos represent the boldest attempt to turn the most prestigious vehicle of Spanish imperial propaganda, epic poetry, into a tool for the expression of colonial political concerns, a project which included but was not limited to the deployment of aggressive practices of poetic imitation, the expression of a new sense of selfhood, and the demarcation of a new sense of patriotism. Nevertheless, from its inception Castellanos' project was also plagued by many contradictions, most of which are the result of his nostalgia for the values and practices commonly associated with the warrior nobility of the feudal era, and by the constraints imposed by simultaneously having to point to and erase the trace of Ercilla's text. / text

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Numerous ancient epics and their heroes share certain characteristics. Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell, among others, developed these characteristics into hero models. In their models, it is mentioned that many heroes undergo a katabasis or a figurative death and resurrection. The presence of a female guide in the hero’s descent into the Underworld has been largely neglected in Classical scholarship, despite the fact that the study of epic has been for some time a largely saturated field. It will be this aspect of the epic that I intend to examine. I will be examining a selection of female guides and will create a model consisting of their similarities loosely based on those models of Raglan and Campbell. I will be examining the role of female guides in various epics; namely, the Gilgamesh Epic (Siduri), the Odyssey (Circe), and the Aeneid (the Sibyl) and in a later chapter, those in the Argonautica (Medea) and the Pharsalia (Erichtho). In addition to these guides, I shall be examining one guide that does not come from epic, Ariadne. The female guides I shall be examining appear in two forms, either as a literal guide who descends with the hero into the Underworld, or as a figurative guide who provides assistance from a distance through advice or instruction. One of the reasons why I feel that this topic is of importance is the socio-historical context in which these texts were written, times and places when women played a largely inferior and subservient role to men. The fictional literary guides seem to be representing strong and independent women. I find this to be remarkable considering the times that these texts were written in. The analysis of these female guides will conclude with a compilation of the similarities they share that shall form the basis for my own female guide model. My model will be established in two consecutive steps: first the female guides Siduri, Circe and the Sibyl will be examined and a preliminary model established. In addition, I will try and prove a common ancestry for them. Secondly, I will test my preliminary model on Medea, Erichtho and Ariadne. As a result, I will propose a final model comprising all the female guides dealt with in my dissertation. This model will be my contribution to scholarship on epic literature from a Comparative approach. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

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