Ekphrasis

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.1.1: Greek Writing and Culture: Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and Imperial, -800--100.
Vol. editors: Jonathan Burgess (University of Toronto), Giacomo Fedeli (University of Exeter), Emily Kneebone (University of Nottingham), Vaios Liapis (Open University of Cyprus), Elodie Paillard (University of Sydney), Mali Skotheim (Ashoka University), Laura Swift (The Open University)

Domains

Poetic/ rhetorical term

Dates

Date of occurrence -010

Places

Ancient Greece (Location)
Ancient Rome (Republic & Empire) (Involved)

The critical term Ekphrasis, derived from the Greek ecphrasis meaning description, originates with Greek Dionysius of Halicanarssus who taught rhetoric in Rome from 30 to 8 BCE and was a leading exponent of aesthetic and critical theory. Ekphrasis was part of the training of students to make such oral descriptions as seem to make subjects vividly present to the hearer. Appropriate subjects included people, actions, seasons, places and events. Classical Greek literature had also included moments where the narrator vividly evoked the perception of a work of art, as when Homer describes the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, Book 18. l. 483-608, and Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE), a contemporary of Dionysius, …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

214 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Ekphrasis". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 May 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1669, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Ekphrasis

Domains

Dates

Places

Save this article

Leave Feedback