Thucydides is only rarely a tangible presence in the narrative of the Peloponnesian War. This chapter shows how the ‘narrator-less’ style of Thucydides’ narration of the war is central to his construction of authority and to the authority of the text. It examines the ways in which Thucydides’ authorial presence is manifested in the work, in both explicit and less explicit ways. And it offers a detailed analysis of the ‘Archaeology’ and its surrounding practice, arguing that this section of the work is the most explicit and sustained instance of Thucydidean self-fashioning.

Vibrant colors, swaggering idols, and enthralled arena. Constellations of fans who exude transformative energy that buoys the brilliance of the moment. Jovial melodies on heart-racing tracks. Hooks that rush straight to your memory. A shining light has been illuminating the K-pop stage since the dawn of the millennium. What started out as a local craze has now become a truly global phenomenon. The interest in various K-pop bands and their prolific performances has only intensified over the years. What magnetic forces are at work to elate the worldwide fan community and heighten the splendor of the constantly evolving scene called K-pop?

This chapter explores Thucydides’ important contribution to the shaping of history as a genre of writing. The discussion focuses in particular on the ways in which Thucydides engaged with other, non-historiographic modes of commemorating the past in the 5th century BCE, a process here labelled ‘meta-history’. The chapter analyses three examples of meta-history in the work: the Periclean Funeral Oration, the Mytilenean Debate and the tyrannicide digression. It shows how these episodes help us understand Thucydides’ claims for the usefulness of his work.

This chapter analyses Thucydides use of sources and his approach to evidence. It surveys his (possible) use of documentary sources and eye-witness testimony, before going on to discuss specific types of evidence cited in the text: inscriptions, letters, poetry and prose writing. The second part of the chapter explores the ways in which Thucydides’ approach to history (and to the writing of history) might have influenced his use of sources, drawing particular attention to the influence that Thucydides’ views of religion might have had on his presentation of events.

This chapter investigates the function of speeches in Thucydides’ work. It shows how speeches are used to advance the action of the story (using the examples of Brasidas’ speeches in Book 4 to illustrate this) and how they play on the expectations and assumptions of Thucydides’ rhetorically aware audience. The function of messengers is also discussed, along with the ‘soundscape’ evoked by less formal speech. Finally, the long-standing debate about of the composition and selection of the speeches is addressed, along with the question of how the speeches (and what Thucydides claims for his speeches) bear on the wider problem of the purpose of the work.

This chapter surveys various forms of identification with and consumption of K-pop idol celebrity and youth culture, from reactions on video logs to K-pop music videos, to theorize the particular forms of vicarious experience that bind K-pop idols to their fans and fans to each other. Vicarity relies on the ubiquitous reflexivity that defines social media platforms as sites of subject formation via media production and consumption. Social media participation constitutes an immersive, everyday form of meta-media, by which vicarious substitution through the consumption of vlogs/reactions induces acutely affective experiences of identification. Vicarious media seem to suggest a proxy for politics as an expression of collective sentiment – the ways in which media platforms bridge the private and the public through the increasingly complex arena of the social. Yet traditional modes of political organizing, remain recognizable in the activities of fan collectives. This chapter thus articulates how K-pop sheds light on the contradictory impulses for intense individuation – through the atomized personas overdetermined by social media and the vlog form – and the corresponding longing for ideals of collective agency and community that we see across multiple nodes of media consumption.

Intersecting critical dance studies and performance studies, this chapter examines K-pop dance as an emerging popular dance medium. It situates K-pop music video choreography within the genealogy of popular dance scholarship by closely reading select point choreographies of iconic K-pop idols over the past decade, such as BTS, BIGBANG, Seventeen, PSY, EXO, BLACKPINK, and TWICE. Styles of K-pop music video include schoolgirls and schoolboys, beast idols and bad girls, dance-centric, experimental, and hybrid. While these categories are preliminary and overlap with one another, the basic styles of choreography open room for discussion on racial and gender identity, hybridity, authenticity, and tourism in transnational contemporary Korean dance beyond the mediated screen.

This chapter investigates Thucydides’ views about morality and justice and the role that these concepts play in his work. It argues that Thucydides’ own ideas about justice were conventional, but that his understanding of the role of justice in shaping human affairs was more novel. The chapter explores the methodological problem of reconstructing Thucydides’ views about justice and morality, given that most statements on these themes are made by characters rather than the author. It then analyses the text’s representation of key ideas about justice, morality and other virtues; it explores how these are manifested in Thucydides’ characterization of individuals in the work; and it surveys the differences between Thucydides’ representation of Spartan and Athenian approaches to justice and morality.

The globalization of K-pop has spawned an inbound flow of tourists and shoppers to the country. As Korean popular culture functions as a window through which audiences come to know Korea, specific places have emerged as sites through which K-culture can be experienced. Beyond conventional tourist destinations, these sites are related to K-pop idols, such as music video shooting locations, cafés and restaurants that idols frequented, locales used as the background of album cover photos, shops that sell celebrity merchandise, K-pop agency buildings, even ordinary parks and bookstores that K-pop stars visited. Thus, “K-pop pilgrimage” has emerged as a new tourism trend, and Korean local governments and the tourist industry are busy creating, discovering, identifying, and publicizing K-pop-associated places. This chapter presents a detailed ethnography of K-pop tourism by ARMY, BTS’s fandom, and discusses how local municipalities and tourism agencies, which have discovered the market power of ARMY, actively promote BTS-themed destinations via social media. By combining the two analyses, this chapter examines the ways K-pop consumption is extended into urban places, thereby reconfiguring the tourist and urban landscapes in Korea.

This chapter offers an analysis of the first book of the History, paying particular attention to the distinctive structure of Book 1. Thucydides’ plan of narrating the war chronologically, by summers and winters, is announced only at the start of Book 2; the structure of Book 1 is much more complex. The chapter starts by exploring ancient critics’ reactions to Book 1’s unusual form, and then it goes on to analyse each of the disruptions to chronological sequence in the book and the reasons for them. It compares these chronological disruptions to other sorts of disjunction (e.g. in style and mode of historical writing) in Book 1. Finally, it raises the question of whether similar disruptions and disjunctions might be found elsewhere in the work.

Thucydides’ reception in the 19th century is a key moment for modern historical thought. This was a period when history was becoming institutionalized as a university discipline, and this chapter shows how Thucydides was invoked as a predecessor by a number of major figures in the field. The chapter also explores why this was the case, drawing attention to the paradox that this invocation of Thucydides entailed: how did a discipline that was seeking to establish itself as ‘modern’ find legitimacy in this ancient text? And how did this influence the way in which Thucydides’ historical project was read and understood?

As an industry situated between globalization and transnationalism, K-pop has become a “glocal” economic transaction that re-localizes the regional markets across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Because K-pop’s glocal enterprise was made possible due to the internet via smartphones, social networks, and user-generated media, some scholars in Southeast Asia have noted K-pop’s major players as new forces of cultural imperialism. With Z-Pop Dream as a case study, this chapter explores how K-pop’s lesser known producers respond to such criticisms by experimenting beyond K-pop’s established system of idol production, consumption, and circulation. Part audition reality show and part idol management system, Z-Pop Dream is a multinational venture that recruits trainees in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. Accordingly, its fan consumer base is also from the seven countries. Piggybacking on K-pop’s transnational success, Z-Pop Dream sells their business model as the next step to making K-pop more accessible to non-Korean fans, cover dancers, and trainees dreaming of becoming idols. Examining how Z-Pop Dream ’s new glocal business model informs, interacts with, or resists an established transnational rhetoric of K-pop, this chapter explores how its rhetoric of “One Asia” underscores the line between national and transnational.

K-pop agencies, or “entertainment companies,” are often described as “idol factories” or “boot camps” in which teenagers are selected to become K-pop idols, trained to acquire a set of skills and manners, evaluated regularly, and forced to conform regarding their looks, behavior, and relationships. The companies must acquire management skills for unexpected situations, such as idols’ dating scandals. In this chapter, the K-pop industry is seen not as a standardized culture built upon a Fordist business model of mass production but as a critical site where diverse social relations are created, negotiated, and contested. The industry sees the idol body as a profitable media text that is manageable, predictable, and available to any general audience. Nonetheless, the idol retains some degree of human agency. In an industry in which an idol body with agency become a volatile product through mediated presentations and representations, how do the companies produce idols at the most complete level? How do the idols cope with their multiple roles and the expectations placed upon them as producers, laborers, and commodities of intimacy? This chapter investigates the methods by which entertainment companies produce idols as incomplete commodities and intimate laborers through surveillance and regulation.

This chapter discusses responses to Thucydides’ History in the thousand-year period between the foundation of Constantinople in 330 CE and the appearance of the first translations of Thucydides in the late 14th century. The chapter describes the processes by which the text was preserved and transmitted and how it was read and understood in this period. It also explores the question of why the Byzantines were interested in Thucydides and the creative ways in which some Byzantine authors adapted or redeployed Thucydides’ work in their own writing.