The Comparative Perspective

Manuela Giordano, University of Calabria, Rende, Italy; Andrea Ercolani, CNR, Rome, Italy.

The book is the third and concluding part of the investigation on Submerged literature in ancient Greece and beyond.
The book expands the inquiry to a comparative perspective, in order to test the validity and usefulness of the hermeneutical approach in other fields and cultures. The comparative case studies deal with gnostic text, Qumran texts, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Cuneiform Texts, Arabic-Islamic literature, ancient Rome, Medieval China, and contemporary southern Italy. The volume tackles themes and questions relating to author and authorship, cultural translation and transmission, the interaction between orality and literacy, myth and folktale. A particular emphasis is given to anthropological themes and methods. In this vein, the book further explores dynamics of emergence and submersion in ancient Greece, including cultural trends promoted respectively by Sparta and Athens.
The volume provides the reader with a wide range of tools and methodological suggestions to reconstruct literary phenomena and cultural processes in a given historical epoch and context, as well as offering new insights for both classical and comparative studies.