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Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus Emily Baragwanath (Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus By Emily Baragwanath (Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Summary

A study of the representation of human motivation in Herodotus' Histories. Emily Baragwanath's focus is upon the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represents this elusive kind of historical knowledge.

Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus Summary

Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus by Emily Baragwanath (Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

In his extraordinary story of the defence of Greece against the Persian invasions of 490-480 BC Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and became critical to their interpretation afterwards. Much as the contemporary sophists strove to discover truth about the invisible, Herodotus was acutely concerned to uncover hidden human motivations, whose depiction was vital to his project of recounting and explaining the past. Emily Baragwanath explores the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represented this most elusive variety of historical knowledge. Thus he was able to tell a lucid story of the past while nonetheless exposing the methodological and epistemological challenges it presented. Baragwanath illustrates and analyses a range of these techniques over the course of a wide selection of Herodotus' most intriguing narratives - from those on Athenian democracy and tyranny to Leonidas and Thermopylae - and thus supplies a method for reading the Histories more generally.

Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus Reviews

A well-crafted and in depth analysis of motivation and narrative in Herodotus... Baragwanath makes a unique contribution to the excellent quality of Herodotean scholarship that we have seen in recent years. * Hyun Jin Kim, Prudentia *
Emily Baragwanath's study of motivation in Herodotus provides a reading of the text that is attentive to detail and subtle, but never loses a sense of empirically plausible processes of composition and reception. * Malcolm Heath, Greece and Rome *
provocative, stimulating, dense, and oftern brilliant monograph... it deals in a highly original and illuminating way with the relationship between ascriptions of motive and the larger narrative strategies of the Histories. * Michael A. Flower, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
a subtle, meticulous, and very original study. * Carolyn Dewald, Hermathena *

About Emily Baragwanath (Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Emily Baragwanath is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

1. The Histories, Plutarch, and reader response ; 2. The Homeric background ; 3. Constructions of motives and the historian's persona ; 4. Problematized motivation in the Samian and Persian logoi (Book III) ; 5. For better, for worse ...: motivation in the Athenian logoi (Books I and VI) ; 6. 'For freedom's sake ...': motivation in the Ionian Revolt (Books V-VI) ; 7. To medize or not to medize ...: compulsion and negative motives (Books VII-IX) ; 8. Xerxes: motivation and explanation (Books VII-IX) ; 9. Themistocles: constructions of motivation (Books VII-IX) ; Epilogue

Additional information

NPB9780199231294
9780199231294
019923129X
Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus by Emily Baragwanath (Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
New
Hardback
Oxford University Press
2008-05-15
400
Winner of 2009-10 Recipient of the Classical Association of the Middle West & South Award for Outstanding Publication Winner of the Conington Prize 2008.
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