Visible God

The Visible God examines the semiotics of wealth, in its various representations, in select works from the ancient Greco-Roman comic tradition represented by Aristophanes and Plautus and from the tradition's inheritors in two later periods through Lucian and Shakespeare. Using diverse literary-critical and sociological methods of reading, the book suggests that in this criticism comedy performs a self-censoring function, a sort of "recontainment" whereby the emancipatory energies of a given item on the agenda for social change may be altered, within a text's rhetorical economy, even as the utopian possibilities of that change, the fantasies of a more equitable distribution of wealth or a more just transmission of patrimony that it gives rise to, can be exploited, to often robust comic effect. This book contributes to the fields of classical studies and comparative literature, melding the studies of rhetoric, Marxist sociological methodology and psychoanalytic approaches to investigate the early configuration of an economic allegory still at work in western culture, broadening a traditional area of inquiry: the roots of modern western literature in the productions of Greece and Rome.