Poets Before Homer : : Collected Essays on Ancient Literature / / Delbert R. Hillers; ed. by F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn State University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Hillers, Delbert R.,
• HerausgeberIn: Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W.,
• MitwirkendeR: McCall, Marsh H.,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2021]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (344 p.)

This volume collects and reprints many of Delbert R. Hillers's most important published essays and articles, his long out-of-print Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets, and three previously unpublished essays, including the aforementioned "'Poets Before Homer': Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition". Hillers gave the latter as the 1992 William Foxwell Albright Lecture at The Johns Hopkins University and in it uses Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, with its "topological" method, as a model for exploring the connections of the most ancient Near Eastern literatures (including the Bible) to later Western literature. Though one of his latest pieces of writing, "Poets Before Homer" represents, as Hillers himself recognized, a fairly clear statement of what he had been doing in much of his earlier scholarship and the volume collects the best of this earlier scholarship. Most of these essays work themselves out from a particular passage, theme, topos, image, or grammatical issue, and gain their interpretive vantage point by reading said passage, etc. comparatively, whether in light of relevant ancient Near Eastern and/or more recent European literary parallels or with reference to some more theoretical interest, such as modern linguistic theory. Hillers's habit of mind ran toward the particular, toward the individual detail. His genius-if this word may be used-was in his capacity to seize upon one aspect of some larger entity, problem, or topic, to work it through, thoroughly and, as often as not, decisively, all the while resisting the temptation to take up the larger, perhaps un(re)solvable complex of which the detail or problem was but a part. The worked example is the Hillersian trademark-"exemplum followed by moralisatio"-and Poets Before Homer collects all of his best.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Foreword -- 1 "Poets Before Homer": Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition -- Part I Traditions in Metaphor, Magic, and Other Aspects of Literature: Some Examples -- 2 A Convention in Hebrew Literature: The Reaction to Bad News -- 3 "The Roads to Zion Mourn" (Lam 1:4) -- 4 Homeric Dictated Texts: A Reexamination of Some Near Eastern Evidence -- 5 A Study of Psalm 148 -- 6. Salamalecchi -- 7 The Effective Simile in Biblical Literature -- 8 Dust: Some Aspects of Old Testament Imagery -- 9 Two Notes on the Decameron (III vii 42-43 and VIII vii 64, IX v 48) -- Part II Traditions in Treaty and Covenant -- 10 Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets -- 11 A Note on Some Treaty Terminology in the Old Testament -- 12 Rite -- Part III Starting Points: Ugarit, Hermopolis, and Palmyra -- 13 The Bow of Aqhat: The Meaning of a Mythological Theme -- 14 A Proposal for a Difficult Line in Keret lm ank ksp -- 15 Redemption in Letters 6 and 2 from Hermopolis -- 16 Analyzing the Abominable: Our Understanding of Canaanite Religion -- 17 Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions and the Old Testament, especially Amos 2:8 -- 18 Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions and the Bible -- Part IV Grinding at Grammar -- 19 Observations on Syntax and Meter in Lamentations -- 20 Delocutive Verbs in Biblical Hebrew -- 21 Hôy and Hôy-Oracles: A Neglected Syntactic Aspect -- 22 Some Performative Utterances in the Bible -- List of Publications -- Doctoral Dissertations Directed at the Johns Hopkins University -- Index of Scripture