Professor of Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics Simon Goldhill

Simon Goldhill

Lively study of conflicts about the meaning of Greek-ness in the modern and ancient worlds.

Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism

Who Needs Greek?

The family that wrote itself -- Sensation! -- Wooing mother -- Bringing up the subject -- Fifty ways to say I hate my father -- Tell the truth, my boy -- A map of biographical urges -- To write a life -- Women in love -- Graphomania -- Being queer -- What's in a name? -- Though wholly pure and good -- He never married -- All London is agog -- Carnal affections -- Be a man, my boy -- "It's not unusual . . ." -- The god of our fathers -- It will be worth dying -- The deeper self that can't decide -- Our father -- Secret history -- Writing the history of the church -- Building history -- Forms of worship -- Capturing the Bensons -- Not I

Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain

A Very Queer Family Indeed

A noted classicist offers a survey of the Greek and Roman roots of everything from hard bodies to political systems, tracing follies and philosophical questions through the centuries to the birthplace of Western civilization.

How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives

Love, Sex & Tragedy

Goldhill Simon

An advanced critical introduction to Greek tragedy for those who do not read Greek. Combines the best contemporary scholarly analysis of the classics with a wide knowledge of contemporary literary studies in discussing the masterpieces of Athenian drama.

Reading Greek Tragedy

Jerusalem is the site of some famous religious monuments in the world, from the Dome of the Rock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Western Wall of the Temple. This work takes you on a tour through the history of this image-filled and ideology-laden city--from the bedrock of the Old City to the towering roofs of the Holy Sepulchre.

City of Longing

Jerusalem

With trademark flair, Simon Goldhill shows how Christianity transformed humanity's relationship with time in ways that resonate today.

Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity

The Christian Invention of Time

Renaud Gagné

Geoffrey Lloyd

Comparatism is reflexive comparison. The regime of comparatism is the horizon of knowledge in which each individual comparison is received and judged. The aim of this book is to turn the comparative insight on itself and compare different comparative moments, exploring various frameworks of comparison in history, religion and anthropology.

Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology

Regimes of Comparatism

This book is a general and systematic study of the genre of dialogue in antiquity, investigating why dialogue matters.

The End of Dialogue in Antiquity

This title presents a revolutionary take on Sophocles' tragic language and how our understanding of tragedy is shaped by our literary past. The book explores Sophocles' distinctive brilliance as a dramatist while investigating how the 19th-century critics developed a specific understanding of tragedy.

Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy

This book explores the cultural conflicts of the second-century CE Roman Empire, through the perspective of Greek writings. The specially commissioned essays investigate the intellectual and social tensions in the era which gave rise to Christianity.

Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire

Being Greek Under Rome

From the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today. In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe. One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.

How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today

A study of ancient Greek poetry analysing the question: what is a poet?

Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature

The Poet's Voice

Chris Kraus

Helene P. Foley

Jas Elsner

Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow Jas Elsner

A collection of essays that brings new insight to the question of the continuing, and inexhaustible, fascination of Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE. There is particular reference to the visual - the myriad ways in which tragic texts are (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and (re)visualized through verbal and artistic description.

Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature

Visualizing the Tragic

Jerusalem is the site of some of the most famous religious monuments in the world, from the Dome of the Rock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Western Wall of the Temple. Since the nineteenth century, the city has been a premier tourist destination, not least because of the countless religious pilgrims from the three Abrahamic faiths. But Jerusalem is more than a tourist site—it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories. It is a city rebuilt by each ruling Empire in its own way: the Jews, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, and for the past sixty years, the modern Israelis. What makes Jerusalem so unique is the heady mix, in one place, of centuries of passion and scandal, kingdom-threatening wars and petty squabbles, architectural magnificence and bizarre relics, spiritual longing and political cruelty. It is a history marked by three great forces: religion, war, and monumentality. In this book, Simon Goldhill takes on this peculiar archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this most image-filled and ideology-laden city—from the bedrock of the Old City to the towering roofs of the Holy Sepulchre. Along the way, we discover through layers of buried and exposed memories—the long history, the forgotten stories, and the lesser-known aspects of contemporary politics that continue to make Jerusalem one of the most embattled cities in the world.

Robin Osborne

This book investigates the claims made about classical Greece being the period and place in which Western civilization developed.

Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece

"[E]xplains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged.... [T]ackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor's role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world."--From publisher description.

The sexy, witty and often bizarre novels, poetry and dialogues of the first centuries of this era (works such as Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius' Leukippe and Cleitophon and Plutarch's Amatorius) were being composed at the same time as fundamental ideas about the body, gender and sexuality were being set in place with the rise of Christianity and the Church to dominate the pagan world. Modern writers on the history of sexuality have largely ignored this literature in favour of prose treatises, philosophy and Christian homilies. Simon Goldhill, writing with the same wit and verve as the ancient writers with whom he engages, sets out to put these texts back into the history of sexuality. The result is a dazzling celebration of sex and sexuality in the Greek literature of the first centuries CE.

Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality

Foucault's Virginity

Written by one of the best-known interpreters of classical literature today, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy presents a revolutionary take on the work of this great classical playwright and on how our understanding of tragedy has been shaped by our literary past. Simon Goldhill sheds new light on Sophocles' distinctive brilliance as a dramatist, illuminating such aspects of his work as his manipulation of irony, his construction of dialogue, and his deployment of the actors and the chorus. Goldhill also investigates how nineteenth-century critics like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wagner developed a specific understanding of tragedy, one that has shaped our current approach to the genre. Finally, Goldhill addresses one of the foundational questions of literary criticism: how historically self-conscious should a reading of Greek tragedy be? The result is an invigorating and exciting new interpretation of the most canonical of Western authors.

Simon Goldhill

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