Visualizing medieval otherworlds in Greco -Byzantine romances.
Item
-
Title
-
Visualizing medieval otherworlds in Greco -Byzantine romances.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3103094
-
identifier
-
3103094
-
Creator
-
Christoforatou, Christina.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Scott D. Westrem
-
Date
-
2003
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Medieval | Literature, Middle Eastern | Language, Ancient
-
Abstract
-
In this dissertation I examine language's ability to generate imagery and to convey multifarious landscapes through the study of ekphrasis, a rhetorical trope that evolved into a staple of medieval Greek romance. Ekphrases of Levantine otherworlds are literary mines of cultural and historical information: they weave into a detailed narrative, information that ranges in origin from the realm of the purely historical to that of the writers' fertile imagination. They also provide unusually clear insight into medieval Greek writers' perceptions of their immediate surroundings, daily life, yearnings, anxieties, and fears; thus, my study of such descriptions brings to the fore the socio-political desires, cultural needs, and literary sensibilities of Greek people in the Middle Ages.;I examine the Greek novelistic romances (100 BC--300 AD) and their Byzantine successors, the romances of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods (1081--1185 and 1204--1453, respectively) in light of the literary and cultural influences that permeated the genre, particularly after the establishment of Christianity as a prominent religion in the Levant, perceiving the Greek romances as products of the intellectual life of the early Roman Empire.;In the first two chapters I explore the interpretive possibilities ekphrasis offers to a contemporary understanding of medieval Levantine otherworlds (utopian, dystopian, real or imaginary) that are described in the early Greek and Byzantine romances. In addition, I study the evolution of idealized pagan locations or enclosed gardens of desire from their early appearance in detailed narrative passages in the Greek novelistic romances, to their Christian appropriation in the Komnenian and Palaiologan romances. Here I focus on the allegorical shift in the projection of utopias and enclosed gardens in an effort to reveal historical, cultural, and religious influences that necessitated such a change.;In chapters three and four I examine the narrative expression of marvelous and sublime episodes in both genres---the Greek novelistic romances and their Byzantine successors. I also examine how the Greek novelistic romances and their Byzantine successors project fantastic and dystopian otherworlds---here I focus on dystopian descriptions and those events (natural or supernatural) and agents (human or divine) that make the existence of such fictional places possible.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
