Theocritus and Things: Material Agency in the Idylls

This book provides a new approach to canonical Greek poetry by foregrounding underrepresented agents (women, nature, and the nonhuman) and bringing Classics into conversation with theoretical frameworks. It decentres the male human subject and listens to a wider cast of characters, offering a "from below" reading that reveals the agency of nature and materiality. It applies Material Ecocriticism to Classics, expanding its chronological remit, and is the first to do so. The book offers a detailed picture of material agency and a diverse cast of characters in Theocritus' Idylls, highlighting the darkness that undercuts the idyll.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 30 June 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Foregrounds underrepresented agents (women, nature, and the nonhuman) in and through the poetry of Theocritus

Provides a new approach to canonical Greek poetry

Brings Classics into conversation with burgeoning theoretical frameworks

Speaks to current political concerns about the relationship between humans and nature

Decentres the male human subject and listens to a wider cast of characters, offering a from below reading

This book contributes to the literary-theoretical field of Material Ecocriticism, expanding its chronological remit, and is the first to apply it to Classics. Material Ecocriticism has been described as an exercise in listening and it is to a series of underrepresented agents (women, nature, the nonhuman) in the poetry of Theocritus that this book urges us to listen. This from below reading that allows nature and materiality their agency, that sees objects and the labour behind them, gives a new way in to the paradoxes of Hellenistic pastoral poetry: the urban backdrop to bucolic poetry, the artifice of the locus amoenus. This book reveals a detailed picture of material agency and a diverse cast of characters human and nonhuman in Theocritus Idylls, showing that while the poetry might be paradoxical it is not rarefied. And through a dark-ecological reading it highlights the darkness that undercuts the idyll.

Weight: 520g
Dimension: 161 x 242 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399517492