Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that gets crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This work discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children''s songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes a