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Full Description
Life / Afterlife traces the development, evolution, and uses of underworld scenes in ancient Greek literature and society. Underworld scenes are a unique form of embedded storytelling, appearing across time and genres. These scenes employ a special register of language that acts as a narrative space outside of chronological time and everyday reality. Suzanne Lye shows how writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Plato, and Lucian, among others, used afterlife depictions as commentaries to communicate a call to action for their audiences in response to cultural, religious, and political changes to their worlds. Using networks of underworld scenes which often featured mythic and historical figures, authors could reinforce or challenge traditional religious and cultural beliefs and practices by presenting the long-term, cosmic effects of actions in life on an individual's post-death experience.
From ancient to modern times, underworld scenes have helped authors and audiences define the essential qualities of a "good life" for different social, political, and religious groups and their societies. This book offers an approach to reading underworld scenes that explains how they function and why they have persisted in various forms, both literary and artistic, from the eighth-century B.C.E. to the present day.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Texts, Translations, and Transliterations
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Synoptic Underworld: Overview of a Narrative Construct
Chapter 2. Afterlife Poetics and Homer's Heroic Underworlds
Chapter 3. Becoming Blessed and Underworlds of Judgment
Chapter 4. Crafting Heroic Blessedness through Underworld Scenes
Chapter 5. World and Underworld: Democratizing the Afterlife through Underworld Scenes
Chapter 6. Plato's Underworlds: Revising the Afterlife
Chapter 7. Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Afterlife
