The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.

Can novels change the world, or must they merely inscribe, and thereby fortify, its injustices? Throughout a range of critical approaches, including new aesthetics, sexuality studies, book history, affect theory, environmental humanities, critical slavery studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, network theory, the spatial turn, world-systems, gender studies, network theory, health humanities, and more, tensions run high in early Americanist literary scholarship between a realist conviction that worlds create books and an equally resolute commitment to the possibility that books – especially fictions – create worlds. This chapter hopes to honor, rather than quiet, this critical ferment. To explain without explaining away will be its challenge. To create a place for those early American authors, meanwhile, who have not until recently been recognized in literary studies because their textual creations do not meet normative standards for book-length imaginative prose will be its sustaining goal.

In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

This introductory chapter examines the scope and range of wonder and the marvellous between Homer and the Hellenistic period, explores the significance of ancient conceptions of wonder in the modern literary critical tradition and outlines this book’s theoretical underpinnings and the scope and content of the subsequent chapters.

This concluding epilogue consists of three diverse case studies which both sum up many of the main continuities and differences in the treatment of wonder in Greek literature and culture from Homer to the early Hellenistic period and simultaneously point towards some further directions for the study of wonder in antiquity and beyond.

This chapter examines the range, scope, generic roots and poetics of Hellenistic paradoxographical collections. The cultural context surrounding the production of the first paradoxographical collections in Ptolemaic Alexandria is thoroughly explored. The relationships between paradoxography, wonder and previous traditions of Greek ethnographic writing and contemporary Peripatetic scientific writing are outlined through the examination of Antigonus of Carystus’ Collection of Marvellous Investigations, Ps. Aristotle’s On Marvellous Things Heard, Herodotus’ Histories, Callimachus’ Aitia and Aristotle’s biological writings.

This chapter explores the complicated relationships between visual, verbal and textual wonder in the Greek literary tradition. Thauma is shown to be an important term of aesthetic response by the beginning of the fourth century BCE. The place of thauma in Greek traditions of poetic ekphrasis is examined. The transition from the conception of a marvel as a purely visual object or as an oral report to the sense of a marvel as something which is written down is explored through texts from Plato, Alcidamas, Homer, Theocritus and Posidippus.

This chapter discusses David Jasper’s notion of theological thinking, as this concept is briefly outlined in the 1995 text “From Theology to Theological Thinking”. It does so by relating sketchily to an early personal encounter with David Jasper on the part of the author, when he faced Jasper with an idea of writing a dialectical post-Christian theology. Jasper was somewhat sceptical about the idea and suggested that theology should rather be post-Ecclesial. The author was rather perplexed by this comment at the time, but in due course realized that they each had very different emphases, despite a profound agreement on certain fundamental cultural issues. This chapter describes Jasper’s notion of theological thinking and puts it in contact with his later works, which may be seen as a kind of post-Ecclesial liturgical writing. This complex is put in relation to the author's own notion of post-Christian theology. The author aims for a more comprehensive critical theoretical perspective that may open up new horizons in radical theology.

This introductory chapter lays out the method, theory and historical framework of the study. It focuses on the potential for historical materialism to help us better understand and critique international law uncovering its structural complicity with oppression, exploitation and dispossession. Along with offering a succinct summary of the capitalist mode of production in Marxist thought, the chapter also reflects on the benefits of combining textual deconstruction with materialist analysis in order to better comprehend law as a textual discipline that is at the same time profoundly entangled with extra-textual processes of capitalist accumulation. Drawing from epistemology and the Marxist philosopher, Luis Althusser, the author defends the importance of a symptomatic reading of international legal materials that centres a specifically juridical problematic.

This chapter takes its cues from Leslie Marmon Silko’s epochal novel Almanac of the Dead in considering the themes of death and survival through transformation, both in the textual history and plot, of Native American literatures throughout the hemisphere. Focusing on the “epic” of Native American literature, the Maya Quiche Book of Counsel, the Popol vuh, the chapter begins by theorizing Native American literatures throughout the Western hemisphere as “writing” in alphabetical script that engages with non-alphabetical pre-Columbian forms of textuality; it proceeds by considering the themes of death, transformation, and survival in the plot of the Popol vuh in light of its textual history—from its pre-Columbian traditions, both hieroglyphic and iconographic, to its alphabetical Maya, Spanish, and ultimately English transmissions. It places particular emphasis on the colonial sociology of the production of the Popol vuh’s first alphabetical transcription in the sixteenth century and of its first Spanish translation during the eighteenth century in the context of mendicant missionary ethnography, which was originally invented as an instrument of ethnocide, namely the extirpation of “idolatry.”

Until recently, Descartes’ idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity, enclosed in the body but constitutionally different from common bodily and external realities, found wide acceptance among students of cognitive sciences. But in the past few years the barriers between outer and inner worlds have begun to blur, projecting the process of cognition as a complex distributed phenomenon. The case of Lucretius and Epicurean philosophy discussed in this paper aims to show that the narrow fortress of the knowing self is not as ancient as some present-day theorists are inclined to think, and that the very concept of distributed cognition, broadly construed, has a history of its own with deep roots in Greco-Roman physiology. Lucretius’ poem provides especially compelling evidence that, on the one hand, Epicurean epistemology conceives of cognition as a material process extended across the borders of atomic bodies, and that, on the other hand, true knowledge can be achieved only through cooperative didactic techniques. Standing at the crossroads between poetry and philosophy, Lucretius’ didactic method tries to involve the addressee (both intellectually and emotionally) in the cooperative construction of an internalized cognitive artefact: the image of the atomic cosmos, faithfully reflected in the text.

In seeking to frame reading as a multimedia event, this chapter looks back to a period in the late nineteenth century when book-makers sought in various ways to refashion their products as audiobooks, and so to undo some of the principles that characterise silent reading. In this way, the chapter elaborates on the familiar history of gramophonic storage media by uncovering a pre-history that stretches right back to the technology of Thomas Edison in the 1870s. This, then, is an experiment in media archaeology, which is alive both to forgotten and aborted attempts to make books talk, and to books that like to imagine in more vicarious ways a reading culture unencumbered by the false principles of an ‘audiovisual litany’, as Jonathan Sterne once put it. The chapter touches on a variety of material – by Edward Bellamy and Bram Stoker, and by the French science fiction writers Albert Robida and Jules Verne – and it does so with a view to showing how imaginative writers anticipated the future of sound media.

Provides an overview of the aims and scope of the project, introducing the ongoing transformation of scriptural texts as a key issue in our understanding of early Judaism. Introduces several key texts that have served as prototypes in the scholarly discussion of early Jewish rewriting.

The mushrooming bureaucracy of the Roman empire made much of documents. These written records – rescripts, inscriptions, edicts, among other things – became a gold standard of authority within a certain ideological schema. But the system was also open to ruffling. This chapter looks at how two seemingly unrelated authors – Justin Martyr and Suetonius – lodged their respective challenges to the authority of the imperial document. First, it examines how Justin manages to be parasitic on the fidelity of the document to find an authorised imperial home for Christianity, at the same time as he devalues the cold culture of official writing against the hot Christian culture of orality and immediacy. Second, it explores how Suetonius stages a movement in his Caesars from faith in the imperial written bureaucracy to disenchantment with documents, and to a concomitant investment in oral forms of knowledge. Most importantly, this epistemological drift actually explains the infamous ‘decline’ of the Caesars from dutifully documented, bureaucratically robust biography to glorified gossip column. The discourse of the document provides a new language of interaction to conduct this meeting of disparate texts.

The vast body of scholarship on Homer since 1900 has focused heavily on questions of orality and textuality, and the transition from the one to the other, though the field has not been immune to the larger trends in literary scholarship.

This chapter draws upon new evidence for the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls to make the case for situating the beginnings of Jewish angelology and demonology in the third century BCE. It considers the new views of scribes, books, and knowledge within sources like the Aramaic Levi Document, Admonitions of Qahat, and Visions of Amram in relation to broader cultural trends in the Hellenistic Near East.