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This collection focuses on the complex interrelationship of revenge and gender in ancient Greek and Roman literature, Icelandic sagas and medieval and early modern English literature. It probes revenge’s gendering, its role in consolidating and contesting gender norms, and its relation to friendship, family roles and kinship structures. It argues that while revenge frequently functions as a repressive cultural script that reinforces conservative gender roles, it also repeatedly triggers events that disturb gender norms, blurring conventional male/female and animal/human binaries, and provoking wider ontological questions. It analyses the ways in which women are seen to be transmogrified by revenge and asks whether there are particular forms of revenge (such as cursing or gossip) that are gendered female. It also examines lamentation, a female-gendered activity which enables women to play an important role in revenge narratives. Including literary works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare, John Marston and John Ford, this collection explores continuities between historical periods as well as the ways in which texts and traditions diverge.

In ancient Greek society, communication was largely oral and visual. The epic poets sang and recited the legends that served the Greeks as their historical past; the art of rhetoric was a vital ingredient in speeches in the assembly and the law courts; in tragedies and comedies actors spoke to audiences of thousands. Of equal importance to the Greeks were the images with which they were always surrounded: civic and religious monuments; statuary; architectural decoration; and the scenes of myth, fantasy and everyday life with which their vases and vessels were painted and decorated. This book explores the ways in which these two central aspects of Greek culture interact, and throws new light on their many and related functions. It discusses the creation of the Greek myths during the early centuries of the first millennium bc; the significance of words and images on painted pottery; the relationship between drama on stage and the illustration of the same stories on pottery; and the ways in which stories portrayed in monumental sculpture on temples were understood by the people who came to look at them. Classical Greece produced the beginnings of the tradition of philosophical reflection on the nature and value of images, notably in the work of Plato and Aristotle: the concept of mimesis, concerned with questions both of representation and expression, is directly addressed by several of the authors, and forms an underlying theme of the book as a whole.