Athenas Justice

Athena is recognized as an allegory or representative of Athens in most Athenian public art except in tragedy. Perhaps this is because tragedy is rarely studied as a public art form or, perhaps, because her character is not static in tragedy. Although Athena's characterization changes to fit the needs of a particular drama, her clear connection with justice remains true throughout and suggests that she is always the representative of the city and its institutions. Athens, the city Athena protected, experienced a dramatic transformation in the fifth century: its political institutions, physical landscape, military power and international prestige underwent dynamic change. Athena, its goddess and its symbol, simultaneously transformed as well, although not always for the better. Athena's Justice follows the question of civic identity and ideology in Athenian tragedy, focusing specifically on the link between tragedy and its influence upon identity creation and promotion during the period when Athens was asserting itself as an imperial power. Through examination of tragedies in which Athena appears, this book traces the process by which Athens came to identify itself with its legal system, symbolized by Athena on stage, and then suffered the corruption of that system by the exercise of imperial power. Athena's Justice is essential reading not just for classicists and ancient historians, but for anyone interested in the interaction between art and politics and the process by which human beings in any period seek to shape their identity as a people.

A playwright turned amateur sleuth who is “the perfect protagonist” solves a murder at a celebration in this historical mystery set in ancient Greece (Financial Times). It’s festival time in Athens, and Philocles is looking forward to the holiday. Visitors are coming from across the Hellenic world for eight days of sporting competitions, musical contests, and sacred rites to honor Athena, the city’s patron goddess. Thousands will flock to the Pnyx to be enthralled by the dramatic three-day performance of Homer’s Iliad, an entertainment unique to the Great Panathenaea. Taking part is the highest honor and greatest challenge for an epic poet. Then one of the poets is brutally murdered. Is this random misfortune, an old score being settled, or is someone trying to sabotage the festival? The authorities want this cleared up quickly and quietly. Philocles finds himself on the trail of a killer once more . . . Longlisted for the 2021 CWA Sapere Books Historical Dagger Praise for the writing of J. M. Alvey: “Historical writing at its best. Riveting.” —Manda Scott, author of the Boudica series “Superb . . . A fabulous read.” —The Irish Times “If you like C J Sansom's Tudor sleuth Matthew Shardlake, you'll love this.” —James Wilde, author of Hereward and Pendragon “Great sense of place, terrific characters and a cracking plot.” —Joanne Harris, New York Times–bestselling author of Chocolat “As vivid and lively as a Greek wedding—but with rather more blood!” —Val McDermid, author of the Kate Brannigan Mysteries “It's about time someone did for ancient Athens what Lindsey Davis’ Falco novels do for Ancient Rome.” —Jack Grimwood, author of Moskva

This book examines how justice and reconciliation in world politics should be conceived in response to the injustice and alienation of modern colonialism?

This book is unique in its critical inquiry into the new woman warrior's appropriation of violence and the Western war narrative. Informed by feminist theoretical debates regarding women's new roles, the authors delve into the meaning of that appropriation for alternative storytelling. To date, television's "ferocious few" have received little scholarly attention. By inviting a variety of perspectives, editors Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy provide a cutting-edge forum to recognize women's increasing role in popular culture as they are cast as action heroes. As a timely and accessible work, this book will appeal to scholars, feminists, cultural critics, and the general reader.

Bourne Identity meets Karen McManus in this action-packed series opener about a spy gone rogue, perfect for fans of Ally Carter and Killing Eve. Jessie Archer is a member of the Athena Protocol, an elite organization of female spies who enact vigilante justice around the world. Athena operatives are never supposed to shoot to kill—so when Jessie can’t stop herself from pulling the trigger, she gets kicked out of the organization, right before a huge mission to take down a human trafficker in Belgrade. Jessie needs to right her wrong and prove herself, so she starts her own investigation into the trafficking. But going rogue means she has no one to watch her back as she delves into the horrors she uncovers. Meanwhile, her former teammates have been ordered to bring her down. Jessie must face danger from all sides if she’s to complete her mission—and survive. Don’t miss this gripping page-turner that New York Times bestselling author Patrick Ness called “a ferocious, take-no-prisoners thriller that actually thrills!”

This book studies major works of literature from classical antiquity to the present that reflect crises in the evolution of Western law: the move from a prelegal to a legal society in The Eumenides, the Christianization of Germanic law in Njal's Saga, the disenchantment with medieval customary law in Reynard the Fox, the reception of Roman law in a variety of Renaissance texts, the conflict between law and equity in Antigone and The Merchant of Venice, the eighteenth-century codification controversy in the works of Kleist, the modern debate between "pure" and "free" law in Kafka's The Trial and other fin-de-siècle works, and the effects of totalitarianism, the theory of universal guilt, and anarchism in the twentieth century. Using principles from the anthropological theory of legal evolution, the book locates the works in their legal contexts and traces through them the gradual dissociation over the centuries of law and morality. It thereby associates and illuminates these masterpieces from an original point of view and contributes a new dimension to the study of literature and law. In contrast to prevailing adherents of Law-and-Literature, this book professes Literature-and-Law, in which the emphasis is historical rather than theoretical, substantive rather than rhetorical, and literary rather than legal. Instead of adducing the literary work to illustrate debates about modern law, this book consults the history of law as an essential aid to the understanding of the literary text and its conflicts.

The twentieth century has been called a century of horror. Proof of that, designation can be found in the vast and ever-increasing volume of scholarly work on violence, trauma, memory, and history across diverse academic disciplines. This book demonstrates not only the ways in which the wars of the twentieth century have altered theological engagement and religious practice, but also the degree to which religious ways of thinking have shaped the way we construct historical narratives. Drawing on diverse sources - from the Hebrew Bible to Commonwealth war graves, from Greek tragedy to post-Holocaust theology - Alana M. Vincent probes the intersections between past and present, memory and identity, religion and nationality. The result is a book that defiescategorization and offers no easy answers, but instead pursues an agenda of theological realism, holding out continued hope for the restoration of the world.

Genre -- the articulation of "kind" -- is one of the oldest and most continuous subjects of theoretical and critical commentary. Yet from Romanticism to postmodernism, the concept of genre has been punched with so many holes that today it hardly seems graspable, let alone viable. By combining theory with dialectical literary histories of three significantly different genres -- tragedy, satire, and the essay -- John Snyder reconstructs genre as the figural deployment of symbolic power. One purpose of this approach is to reconcile the recent dismantling of representational and classificatory genres with the incipient notion in post-Althusser Marxism that genre is the crucial mediation between history and aesthetics. Snyder extends certain implications of Aristotle, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Serres. He also offers the first antisystem yet comprehensive genre theory to serve as a fully distinct alternate to Frye's formalist and Genette's structuralist schemes. Finally, Snyder's theory of genre as power opens a way to a fundamentally new theory of literature itself: that aesthetic language deployed as power organizes itself as generic intervention. Three historically dynamic configurations establish the range of all possible genres -- tragedy as power politically deployed as mimesis, satire as power rationally deployed as rhetoric, and the essay as power textually deployed as constative rhetoric. Specific analyses developing this important new theory cover a broad spectrum of literature, from classical to contemporary. Other genres, different media, and a variety of subgenres and modes political and religious -- all acquire fresh significance from the elaborations of Snyder's three selected genres.

"Witty and heartfelt essays, shaken and stirred."—Kirkus Reviews "David Mason believes in literature as a weather event—even an extreme one. He reads to be changed—drenched, burned, blown away. He has no wish to have his standing position confirmed, and is alert to the ways in which his subjects are changed, both by their writing and its reception. These essays move comfortably from the lines of a Nobel Prize-winning poet to the dwelling of a Greek peasant who could have stepped out of Homer, on to the perils of literary biography. Mason is a reader as much as he is a writer. He looks into the political in order to find the personal—not the other way round. Incarnation & Metamorphosis is engaging all the way through, not least when Mason acts on the assumption, 'The imagination is free.'”—James Campbell, author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin “Literary criticism,” David Mason writes, “ought to entertain as well as illuminate.” In these essays Mason tells stories about embodiment and change, incarnation and metamorphosis, drawing connections between art and life without confusing the two. Mason considers the many kinds of change we encounter in our lives, our desire for justice, and the ways great writers complicate that desire. He discusses the lives and works of writers like Montaigne, Diderot, and Neruda as well as his colorful father’s fascination with a fictional character. He takes up such contemporary figures as the daring Australian writer Helen Garner, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the poet-critic Dana Gioia; has fresh things to say about the perils of fame in the careers of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney; and mourns the loss of poet Michael Donaghy. Incarnation & Metamorphosis is a book about living with literature—Mason writes that literature “is telling us that we are seen, warts and all. Criticism, such as the essays in this book, is a way of seeing back.”