The Poetics of Colonization

Tales of archaic Greek city foundations continued to be told and re-told long after the colonies themselves were settled, and this book explores how the ancient Greek constructed their memory of founding new cities overseas. Using anthropological and literary theory, Dougherty shows that colonial narratives are not just sources of historical information and that they construct a world in which the colonized are assimilated into the familiar story-lines, metaphors, and rituals of the colonizers. The distinctiveness and the universality of Greek colonial representations are explored through explicit comparison with later European narratives of new world colonization.