Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference: Living Life as Fiction (1)

By: Stephen E. Kidd

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Synopsis: Lucian’s writings raise questions about the nature of reading and viewing the lives of others; this book explores these questions through close readings of Lucian’s dialogues and stories.Lucian scholarship over the past decades has been dominated by terms like performance and personas, so this book asks simply: what happens when we are not performing? When we read or sit in the audience, we cannot perform for the world we are viewing. Nor can we act on our desires and beliefs, since we have no self in that viewed world to move around like an avatar. Is there anything left of us at such moments? As a satirist, Lucian explored these questions not through philosophical arguments but stories – a traveler who looks down on earth from the moon, a philosopher who retires to a contemplative life “as if high up in a theater”, a narrator who demands that a reader not believe anything he writes, and many more. Over the course of seven chapters, this book explores these questions of reading, performing, and the difference via detailed analyses of some of Lucian’s best-known works: Hermotimus, Charon, Icaromenippus, Nigrinus, Rooster, True Stories, and others.Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference is suitable for students and scholars of ancient Greek literature, Classics and the Humanities, particularly those interested in questions about Lucian and literary interpretation.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 206 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9781040310250
Related ISBNs:: 9781032936499, 9781040310229, 9781003566946
Publisher:: Taylor & Francis
Date of Addition:: 02/25/25
Copyrighted By:: Stephen E. Kidd, The right of Stephen E. Kidd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Drama, Plays and Theater, Language Arts, Humor
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.