The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially embedded mechanisms and processes by which elites of the Rwandan Patriotic Front maneuvered to create modified arrangements of things past, these chapters excavate the microfoundations of the authoritarian rule of law in Rwanda. This chapter traces the obscure beginnings of the idea of gacaca in pre-genocide Rwanda, then accounts for the modernization of this social imaginary in the late 1990s.

Homer’s technique of oral composition is highly traditional and tightly regulated, to the point that it presents us with a paradox: how can Homer be regarded as such a great poet, when so much of what he did was not original, but mechanical? While past critics have argued that Homer achieved greatness despite the mechanicity of his technique (and thus trascended it), this book explores the hypothesis that the mechanicity of the technique (and particularly the formal features of formularity, meter, and dialect) should be seen as adaptive features that enabled Homer’s greatness.

The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

The 1860s is a decade that, in many ways, marks the death of the Victorian era and the start of a long modernism. Certainly for British poetry, the 1860s marks a moment of historical retrospection, summation, and definition, and, simultaneously, the start of a new poetry of Why is this spelled out?modernity. The year 1861 marked Prince Albert’s death but also a landmark publication that is often overlooked because of ital its popular status: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which was to remain a definitive articulation of the lyric tradition in English poetry for at least a century. Yet the same decade also saw the publication (in 1866) of a volume of poetry that was crucial in opening the door to a new kind of poetry in English: Swinburne’s ital 1866 Poems and Ballads (First Series). This chapter explores the nature and importance of Palgrave’s historical anthology in counterpoint with the birth of a striking new aestheticist poetry.

A brief illustration of past interpretations of power is followed by alternative definitions of power as differential of potential, as barrier to entry, as relative weight. Webers ideal types of power (legal, traditional, charismatic) are combined with the main areas of power (economy, politics, culture) in a scheme for attempting a characterization of different societies and their evolution in time. Cumulative processes and balancing processes in the evolution over time of the distribution of power in society are then considered.

Fears do not simply reflect the reality of the underlying dangers. Fear is itself created by society’s debates about what count as risks and how these should be managed. Beck has argued that modernity’s uncertainties have arisen from technological developments themselves, in that these have generated self-destructive threats that they are incapable of controlling. This chapter argues that Rome’s social structure generated its own specific set of anxieties. Just as technology has today created anxieties about the downside of that innovation, in Rome, empire generated a set of fears concerning its perceived negative side-effects. These were focused on moral issues, and their anxieties were expressed in areas where they had their own expertise, in particular the law and rhetoric. Their fears were also often constructed in a backward-looking way, seeking to reduce future risk by returning to the traditions of the past.

This chapter explores the role of intertextuality in jazz. I argue that major variants of intertextuality– in particular, post-structuralism and Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”– miss what is most important to jazz: the way jazz has served as a vehicle for both the transmission of tradition and a dialogue within it and with other genres. I suggest that Bakhtin’s dialogism illuminates those neglected intertextual features and show how jazz musicians intertextually “re-accent” or “signify” in their use of quotations, licks, style, and repertory. Players quote, use licks, affirm and cross genre boundaries, and improvise over standards in order both to contribute to a tradition and alter it by expressing their individuality. In Jason Moran’s recent work engaging with Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller, he uses stylistic, generic, and repertory-based intertextuality to make the case for jazz as a far reaching but ultimately unified continuum. He thus connects with a larger tradition, but at the same time through recontextualization and re-accenting uses those utterances for self-expression and pushes against cultural– and, by implication, social and political– boundaries. Thus intertextual jazz performances simultaneously express the musicians themselves and engage with the larger whole(s) of which they are a part.

This chapter continues the defense of ethical environmentalism by introducing the integration thesis. This thesis holds that the ethical, interpersonal and impersonally valuable dimensions of morality interlock in ways that frustrate efforts to focus exclusively on one without attending to the others. The case for ethical environmentalism would be considerably strengthened by the truth of the integration thesis. This chapter presents a series of arguments in support of the integration thesis, each of which builds on the integral connection between distributive fairness and the common good of a society. Policies and laws that at first pass do not appear to be distributive are shown to have distributive effects on the lives of those who are subject to them that merit consideration at the bar of fairness. Given the truth of the integration thesis, the chapter next argues that the project of ethical environmentalism lends substantial support to certain forms of legal paternalism, state support for impersonal goods, such as natural beauty and human excellence, and state support for the goods of tradition. The chapter concludes by relating the project of ethical environmentalism to Devlin’s thesis that a society may use the law to preserve itself.

The chapter provides an account of the various authorities – the scripture, apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition, the positive law of the church – that underpinned and informed the practices of the national church. The Laudian contention that the right sort of ceremonial performance served to unite the practice of the militant church with that of the triumphant is outlined, and the Laudians’ combination of traditional conformist arguments about things indifferent with more novel contentions about scripture, and thus their capacity to render ceremonies previously held to be indifferent religiously significant and spiritually effectual while still insisting on their status as adiaphora, is stressed. The result was minimum and maximum justifications of the Laudian programme, which could be used to win over different audiences or constituencies.

It is often said that while the West recognized the rule of law, China did not. Many scholars believe that Chinese courts applied Confucian norms of conduct that were expressed, not as rules, but as moral principles. Chinese magistrates, however, decided cases according to known rules. These rules concerned, not standards of conduct, but with the punishment appropriate in various cases of wrongdoing. A great deal of energy and intellectual sophistication went into determining how severely one offense should be punished compared with another. This concern went back to the first, and anti-Confucian dynasty, the Qin. It explains why the rule of law in China differed from the rule of law in the West, and why, although it was compatible with Confucianism, it was not an expression of Confucian moral principles.

This short conclusion briefly summarises the book’s contentions regarding language, iteration, reworked traditions, mimesis, world-building and communities, before articulating a final argument for the importance and interest of Fantasy.