Author:
Schellenberg, Ryan S. author.
ImprintNew York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]
Descriptionxiii, 231 pages ; 25 cm
Note:Introduction: Paul, Prison, and the Social History of Emotions -- Far More Imprisonments: Punitive Custody in the Letters of Paul -- To Die Is Gain: Subjection, Glory, and Paul's Wish for Death -- Speaking with All Boldness: Prison in the Roman Social Imagination -- I Have Learned to Be Content: Performing the Autarkic Self -- Rejoice with Me: the Epistolary Cultivation of Collective Emotion -- Conclusion: The Body of Our Humiliation.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-207) and indexes.
Note:"No extant text gives so vivid a glimpse into the experience of an ancient prisoner as Paul's letter to the Philippians. As a letter from prison, however, it is not what one would expect. For although it is true that Paul, like some other ancient prisoners, speaks in Philippians of his yearning for death, what he expresses most conspicuously is contentment and even joy. Setting aside pious banalities that contrast true joy with happiness, and leaving behind too heroic depictions that take their cue from Acts, Abject Joy offers a reading of Paul's letter as both a means and an artifact of his provisional attempt to make do. By outlining the uses of punitive custody in the administration of Rome's eastern provinces and describing the prison's complex place in the social and moral imagination of the Roman world, this book provides a richly drawn account of Paul's subelite social context, where bodies and their affects were shaped by acute contingency and habitual susceptibility to violent subjugation. Informed by recent work in the history of emotions, and with comparison to modern prison writing and ethnography provoking new questions and insights, Abject Joy describes Paul's letter as an affective technology, wielded at once on Paul himself and on his addressees, that works to strengthen his grasp on the very joy he names"-- Provided by publisher.
