Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction: sounding out The Poet’s Voice
- 1 The poet hero: language and representation in the Odyssey
- 2 Intimations of immortality: fame and tradition from Homer to Pindar
- 3 Comic inversion and inverted commas: Aristophanes and parody
- 4 Framing, polyphony and desire: Theocritus and Hellenistic poetics
- 5 The paradigms of epic: Apollonius Rhodius and the example of the past
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Comic inversion and inverted commas: Aristophanes and parody
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction: sounding out The Poet’s Voice
- 1 The poet hero: language and representation in the Odyssey
- 2 Intimations of immortality: fame and tradition from Homer to Pindar
- 3 Comic inversion and inverted commas: Aristophanes and parody
- 4 Framing, polyphony and desire: Theocritus and Hellenistic poetics
- 5 The paradigms of epic: Apollonius Rhodius and the example of the past
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poet's VoiceEssays on Poetics and Greek Literature, pp. 167 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024