The Ancient Emotion of Disgust
normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in
many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy.
This collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek and Latin literature, its social
uses as a means of marginalizing individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments, and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life (Galli,
actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres: ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography, Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and
modern approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of "projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally condemnable categories of
individuals. The volume is addressed first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social
psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies.
Publisher Name | Oxford University Press USA |
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Author Name | Hagendorf, Col |
Format | Audio |
Bisac Subject Major | LIT |
Language | NG |
Isbn 10 | 0190604115 |
Isbn 13 | 9780190604110 |
Target Age Group | min:NA, max:NA |
Dimensions | 00.93" H x 00.06" L x 20.00" W |
Page Count | 336 |
Donald Lateiner is an author, editor, and the Professor of Humanities in Classics, Emeritus at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has published numerous works on Classical antiquity. Dimos Spatharas is Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Crete. He has an extensive background in study and translation of Ancient Greek history and culture.