Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Nobody knows the identity or background of the Roman author Q. Curtius Rufus, or when he wrote his History of Alexander the Great. This text along with Arrian’s Anabasis, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, Diodorus Siculus Book 17 and Justin’s Epitome of Trogus Books 11–12 and the Metz Epitome is one of the main ancient sources on the reign and campaigns of the Macedonian conqueror. This chapter surveys current thinking on Curtius’ history, including issues like the historian’s probable sources, his literary structure, intertexuality and his characterization of Alexander. In particular the chapter explores the historian’s excursuses – in which he appears to be speaking in propria persona on Alexander’s personality as well as his portrayal of Alexander’s relationships with women, including the Athenian courtesan, Thais ,and the Amazon queen, Thalestris, and especially, the Persian queen, Sisygambis, the mother of Darius III.

The representation of an Amazon queen’s fantasized body turns attention to what is concealed by Amazon dress. These celanda function as a somatized preterition of Amazon customs that incites readerly speculation around their social meaning within an imagined society. Together with unanswered questions about the variantly gendered body and its meanings, the alterity of her physical presence invites the reader to entertain utopian alternative organizations of gendered identity grounded in a sexually variant perspective at the margin of the text’s fictional world. The preteritive attention paid to her experience and the world view of her society thus opens up the possibility of an "Amazon reading" of Alexander himself, and by extension an Amazon reading of the epic that celebrates his exploits. With the possibility of Amazon reading comes as well the possibility of solidarity among those who read like Amazons, a solidarity effected not by any commonality of essential identity, but by their willingness to read the text’s preteritions against the grain of a sanctioned, "straight" interpretation informed by the received cultural values of an "ideal" audience.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

In an article on football in DeLillo’s work written for The New Yorker, Jake Nivens   discusses how the sport became “fertile material for [DeLillo's] career-long investigation of language”. The shared prominence of football within End Zone (1972) and The Silence (2020) is telling, but DeLillo’s interest in sport in general extends throughout much of his work. As Nivens suggests, language is key to how this theme develops – however, analysing sports in DeLillo’s writing more broadly may enable discussion of other aspects of his work.

Many existing studies of sport in DeLillo’s writing focus on particular depictions within particular texts. For example, the role of football in End Zone has been the subject of much critical investigation. Similarly, baseball plays a pivotal role in Underworld (1997) –most famously in its semi-autonomous prologue. Building on these studies, this chapter provides a broad overview of DeLillo’s writing on sports, tracing the ways it provides a unique corpus of work within his oeuvre. It traces the development of this theme as it oscillates in importance throughout his career, exploring the commercial and critical responses it has been subject to.

This chapter surveys the main treatments of Alexander in Jewish literature (in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic), from the Hellenistic period to the Hebrew Alexander Romances and the medieval biblical and Talmudic commentators. Themes discussed include the prophecy of Daniel regarding Alexander and Makedonian rule, the king’s visit to Jerusalem, the analogies drawn between his character and role and those of Cyrus and Antiochos IV, and the value attached to his name and personality by the Jewish community in Alexandria. The Romances tell of Alexander’s adventures with gymnosophists, Amazons, and his wise judgement given to the king of Katzia. Though a hero and sage in Jewish tradition, his aspirations to divinity make him an imperfect role model for the rabbinic scholars.

Chapter 2 examines the altered body of the female mastectomy survivor. Such women may be viewed as correlates to castrati in that they too were often exoticised: the figure of the one-breasted Amazon was an erotic and ethnographic spectacle. In this guise the mastectomied woman was also, like the castrato, sexually dangerous and functionally unique, with her bodily alteration believed to confer martial advantages. Unlike castrati, however, the altered status of the Amazon body was consistently obfuscated, and was never linked to instances of medical mastectomy. This occurred in spite of the fact that mastectomy was well known as a cure for breast cancer in the early modern period; indeed, the cancerous body and the Amazonian body had troubling parallels, both being perceived as rejecting or perverting maternal function. The absolute exclusion of one-breasted bodies from the stage and from domestic narratives reveals how far the status of the altered body was determined by patriarchal social structures.

The macho pulps’ portrayal of women, especially non-European foreign women, left young male readers with the impression that American dominance overseas allowed them to engage in a form of sexual oppression. Still, contemporary anxieties remained. Thus, the magazines highlighted the “red seductress,” the communist femme fatale who used her body to lure good men astray. In these storylines, women were both beautiful and deceitful, depictions which could be particularly unnerving for young men inexperienced in sex. The magazines also portrayed “exotic Orientals,” women of “darker races,” as sexually available, desirous of Americans, and a counter to stifling wives at home. As in storylines on German Frauleins or communist spies, however, Asian women could be just as deceitful, using their bodies as weapons of war. Thus, the objectification of women was perpetuated by adventure magazines, especially concerning those women who weren’t American or European. In large sense, men’s adventure magazines created a fantasy world where young men easily could find sex in almost any wartime environment. And even when women did fight alongside men, as they did in some storylines, sexualized versions of women – Amazonian tropes were common – helped leave readers with the impression that strong male warriors were also sexual conquerors.