The Politics of Form in Greek Literature explores the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender).
Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences.

Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London, UK. He is author of The Classics and Colonial India (2013) and co-editor (with D. L. Selden) of The Oxford Handbook of the Literatures of the Roman Empire (in progress) and (with Susan A. Stephens) of Classics and National Cultures (2010). He is series editor of Bloomsbury's Ancients and Moderns series.

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors

Introduction
Phiroze Vasunia, University College London, UK

Part I: Verse (and Some Prose)

1. Disagreement, Complexity and the Politics of Homer's Verbal Form
Ahuvia Kahane, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

2. Sophocles' Antigone, Feminism's Hegel and the Politics of Form
Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge, UK

3. The Aporia of Action and the Agency of Form in Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis
Victoria Wohl, University of Toronto, Canada
4. Forms of Survival
Susan Stephens, Stanford University, USA

Part II: Prose (and Some Verse)

5. The Politics of Informed Form: Plato and Walter Benjamin
Andrew Benjamin, Monash University, Australia

6. Plato's Seventh Letter, or How to Fashion a Subject of Resistance
Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina, USA

7. Body Politics in Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric
Nancy Worman, Barnard College/Columbia University, USA

8. Aristotle's Lost Works for the Public and the Politics of Academic Form
Edith Hall, King's College London, UK

9. Politics and Form in Xenophon
Rosie Harman, University College London, UK

Part III: Word and Image

10. The Politics of Form in Eighteenth-Century Visions of Ancient Greece
Daniel Orrells, King's College London, UK

11. Ekphrasis, Leo Spitzer and the Politics of Form
Ruth Webb, Université Lille, France

Notes
Bibliography
Index