Some of the 16 chapters are revised from presentations at the 2014 Celtic Conference in Classics in Edinburgh, and the others have been commissioned for the volume. Together they cover theoretical approaches to lists and catalogues in ancient literature; the cultural poetics of enumeration: contexts, materiality, organization; the poetics of the epic catalogue; and beyond the epic catalogue: literary appropriations of lists and catalogues. The topics include theorizing lists in literature: towards a listology, textual webs: how to read mythographic lists, catalogues in Greek and Akkadian epic: a comparative approach, looking backwards to posterity: catalogues of ancestry from Homer to Ovid, and five times seven: cataloguing the seven against Thebes in four Greek tragedies. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Lists and catalogues have been en vogue in philosophy, cultural, media and literary studies for more than a decade. These explorations of enumerative modes, however, have not yet had the impact on classical scholarship that they deserve. While they routinely take (a limited set of) ancient models as their starting point, there is no comparably comprehensive study that focuses on antiquity; conversely, studies on lists and catalogues in Classics remain largely limited to individual texts, and with some notable exceptions offer little in terms of explicit theorising. The present volume is an attempt to close this gap and foster the dialogue between the recent theoretical re-appraisal of enumerative modes and scholarship on ancient cultures.
The 16 contributions to the volume juxtapose literary forms of enumeration with an abundance of ancient non-, sub- or para-literary practices of listing and cataloguing. In their different approaches to this vast and heterogenous corpus, they offer a sense of the hermeneutic, epistemic and methodological challenges with which the study of enumeration is faced, and elucidate how pragmatics, materiality, performativity and aesthetics are mediated in lists and catalogues.
