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Full Description
Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology.
Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.
Contents
Abbreviations ix 1. Narratives of Resistance and Romance: Democracy and Comedy in the Early Hellenistic Period 1 Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy 1 The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot 13 Comedy's Constitutive Political Silence 17 Constituting Citizens: The Laws of Genre and State 19 Comedy's Poetics of Political Membership 21 Opposites Attract: Rape,Romance,and Democratic Selection 24 The Power of Love: Female Selection and Male Education 30 Reproduction and Resistance 33 2. Reproducing Democracy in Oligarchic and Autocratic Athens 40 The Reproducibility of Athenian Democracy 40 The Policies and Politics of Demetrius of Phaleron: Law,Power,and Prior Restraint 43 Athens and the Antigonids: The Failed Foundation of Hellenistic Democracy 52 "Romantic" Resistance: Comedy and the Sterility of Empire 59 3. Making Citizens in Comedy and Court 68 Gender and Democratic Identity 68 The Importance of Acting Athenian 72 Engendering Egalitarianism 74 The Politics of Seduction 83 Passionate Protagonists and Practical Citizens 91 The Comic Romance Narrative: Marrying Interest and Necessity 96 Staging a Biopolitics of Democratic Citizenship 99 Democratic Reproduction in the Aspis 106 4. The Ethics of Democracy in Menander's Dyskolos 110 The Politics of Love at First Sight 110 The Democratic Logic of the Comic Plot 113 The Class Politics of Sexual Conduct 115 Performing Egalitarianism 121 Ethical Identity and the Democratization of Social Relations 123 Marriage Exchange and the Critique of Ideology 129 Egalitarianism and Inclusion 134 5. The Politics of Sexuality in Drama and Democratic Athens: The Case of Menander's Samia 137 The Father-Son Romance 137 Forensic Theater: Staging Comedy as Court 141 The Consequences of Nonconjugal Cohabitation 147 Demeas's Defense: Revising the Tragic Family Plot 150 Shame, Poverty, and Anger: The Politics of Affect 156 The Work of Prostitutes: The Importance of a Gender Stereotype 159 The Fragility of Manhood 167 6. The Mercenary Romance: Gender and Civic Education in the Perikeiromene and Misoumenos 171 Socializing the Mercenary Lover 171 Power and Punishment: Problems in the Perikeiromene 173 Learning the Language of Law: The Embedded Drama of Civic Education 180 Gender and International Relations 183 The Return of the Repressed: Gender and the Constraints of Genre 186 Negotiations of Martial and Marital Values in the Misoumenos 188 The Conquering Captive: Genre and Gender Inversion 192 Civic Reciprocity and the Revision of Epic Manhood 194 Ethics and Comedy's Construction of Transnational or Hellenic Citizenship 198 7. Trials of Masculinity in Democratic Discourse and Menander's Sikyonioi 202 The Loss of the Citizen-Soldier Ideal 202 The Macedonian Question and Athenian Civic Identity 206 The Moral Manliness of the Democratic Man 212 Menander's Sikyonioi: The Male Recognition Plot 215 Ideology and Intertextuality 220 Moschion's Revealing Complexion 222 The Lastauros: An Anti-Macedonian Tradition? 227 Stratophanes' Embodied Biography 231 Metadrama and the Illusion of Identity 234 Remasculinizing and Reproducing the Democratic State 237 8. Conclusion: Inevitable Reproduction? 243 Bibliography 255 Acknowledgments 279 Index Locorum 281 General Index 287
