Masks of authority

"Exploring a variety of literary texts representing different poetic genres, Claude Calame, an internationally known classicist, draws the lineaments of a real history of the means used by ancient Greek poets to create in their works a fictional authorship. In this collection of essays, he shows that they made of their poems, through various discursive strategies, texts to be performed, with the collective, ritual, and pragmatic values implicit in the ideas of craft and performance." "The result is a selective history of Greek poetics from the perspective of its authorial devices and social functions, its place between oral and written traditions."--Jacket.