ISBN: 9780691037882

For the Greeks and Romans the earth's furthest perimeter was a realm radically different from what they perceived as central and human. The alien qualities of these "edges of the earth" b… More...

For the Greeks and Romans the earth's furthest perimeter was a realm radically different from what they perceived as central and human. The alien qualities of these "edges of the earth" became the basis of a literary tradition that endured throughout antiquity and into the Renaissance, despite the growing challenges of emerging scientific perspectives. Here James S. Romm surveys this tradition, revealing that the Greeks, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Romans, saw geography not as a branch of physical science but as an important literary genre. The tradition described by Romm emerged in Homer and Hesiod, whose imaginative geography defined the earth by giving it boundaries - the river Ocean, the Pillars of Heracles, and other mythic forms of circumscription. Other Greek authors developed exotic literary landscapes by filling these "limits" with idealized human societies and bizarre or monstrous animal life, while the Romans adapted the concept of perimeters to goals of imperial conquest. As Hellenistic and Roman voyages of exploration failed to confirm the fancied landscapes, the tradition came to be seen as one in which invented narratives had masqueraded as truths. As a result some of late antiquity's most daring innovators seized on geography as a theme for prose fiction, and the explorer's log became an important antecedent of the early modern novel. Media > Book, [PU: Princeton University Press]<

1992, ISBN: 9780691037882

gewerbliches Angebot, [SC: 7.50], [PU: Princeton University Press], [PU: GB], NL, 1992, paperback, goed exemplaar / good copy Introduction: Geography as a Literary Tradition --The Boundar… More...

gewerbliches Angebot, [SC: 7.50], [PU: Princeton University Press], [PU: GB], NL, 1992, paperback, goed exemplaar / good copy Introduction: Geography as a Literary Tradition --The Boundaries of Earth --Boundaries and the Boundless --Ocean and Cosmic Disorder --Roads around the World --Herodotus and the Changing World Picture --Aristotle and After --Ethiopian and Hyperborean --The Blameless Ethiopians --The Fortunate Hyperboreans --Arimaspians and Scythians --The Kunokephaloi --Wonders of the East --Before Alexander --Marvel-Collectors and Critics --The Late Romance Tradition --Ultima Thule and Beyond --Antipodal Ambitions --The North Sea Coast --The Headwaters of the Nile --The Atlantic Horizon --Geography and Fiction --Ocean and Poetry --The Voyage of Odysseus --Pytheas, Euhemerus, and Others --The Fictions of Exploration --Epilogue: After Columbus., Banküberweisung, Kreditkarte, PayPal, Internationaler Versand<