Pindar's Verbal Art: An Ethnographic Study of Epinician Style

By James Bradley Wells

In Pindar's Verbal Art, James Bradley Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. This is the first study of Pindar's language that applies performance as a method for the ethnographic description and interpretation of entextualized records of verbal art. In Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, Pindar's Verbal Art is a sociological stylistics of epinician language and demonstrates that Pindar's is a highly dialogical form of art, an intertextual web of voices, whose study enables us to appreciate popular dimensions of his songs. Wells offers a new take on recurrent Pindaric questions: genre, the unity of the victory song, tradition, and, principally, epinician performance.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674036271
• ISBN13: 9780674036277
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"