Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games
This book is the first to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?

Thinking the Olympics brings together contributions from various disciplines, including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history. Together these perspectives foreground two opposing plots which recur and collide ritually on the occasion of the Games. On the one hand, the Games present themselves as an ideal enactment of pure, intrinsic Olympic values; on the other, the Games appear as a messy performance of extrinsic investments by diverse parties with their own interests, commercial and political. Power, money, property, and identity are persistently at stake in the Games. But in a time when credit and trust among nations are in short supply, the Olympic arena and its flexible traditions may be where exchange can be done.
1112501756
Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games
This book is the first to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?

Thinking the Olympics brings together contributions from various disciplines, including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history. Together these perspectives foreground two opposing plots which recur and collide ritually on the occasion of the Games. On the one hand, the Games present themselves as an ideal enactment of pure, intrinsic Olympic values; on the other, the Games appear as a messy performance of extrinsic investments by diverse parties with their own interests, commercial and political. Power, money, property, and identity are persistently at stake in the Games. But in a time when credit and trust among nations are in short supply, the Olympic arena and its flexible traditions may be where exchange can be done.
58.95 In Stock
Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games

Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games

Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games

Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games

Overview

This book is the first to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?

Thinking the Olympics brings together contributions from various disciplines, including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history. Together these perspectives foreground two opposing plots which recur and collide ritually on the occasion of the Games. On the one hand, the Games present themselves as an ideal enactment of pure, intrinsic Olympic values; on the other, the Games appear as a messy performance of extrinsic investments by diverse parties with their own interests, commercial and political. Power, money, property, and identity are persistently at stake in the Games. But in a time when credit and trust among nations are in short supply, the Olympic arena and its flexible traditions may be where exchange can be done.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780715639306
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 10/27/2011
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Barbara Goff is Professor of Classics, University of Reading.
Michael Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Goldsmiths University of London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

List of Contributors viii

List of Illustrations xi

Introduction: Game Plan Barbara Goff 1

1 Pythagoras and the Origins of Olympic Ideology Nigel Spivey 21

2 True Heroes and Dishonourable Victors at Olympia David Oilman Romano 40

3 To Give Over One's Heart: Pindar, Bataille and the Poetics of Victory Damian Stocking 57

4 Epideictic Oratory at the Olympic Games Eleni Volonaki 76

5 Living in the Shadow of the Past: Greek Athletes during the Roman Empire Stephen Brunet 90

6 Gilbert West and the English Contribution to the Revival of the Olympic Games Hugh Lee 109

7 James Barry's Crowning the Victors at Olympia: Transmitting the Values of the Classical Olympic Games into the Modern Era William Pressly 123

8 The Race for a Healthy Body: The Ancient Greek Physical Ideal in Victorian London Debbie Challis 141

9 Nervi's Palazzo and Palazzetto dello Sport: Striking a Delicate Balance between Past and Present in 1960 Rome Ann Keen 156

10 Trailing the Olympic Epic: Black Modernity and the Athenian Arena, 2004 Michael Simpson 171

11 Pindar at the Olympics: The Limits of Revivalism Armand D'Angour 190

Afterword: London 2012 Tessa Jowell 204

Bibliography 205

Index 223

From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Customer Reviews