Submerged Literature in an Oral Culture

An overall overview about poetic comunication in archaic and classical age is the first step to define the category of "submerged literature", which is the focus of the volume. Submerged literature is the complex of texts which never entered the process of publication and preservation and for this reason were unable to survive. These texts were published during a real occasion, that is a social event which involves normal people as well as poets. For this reason the occasion is the nucleus around which poems were composed. This is the main feature of greek poetry of archaic and classical age. Since those texts disappeared for the most, particular attention is devoted to the study of the relationships between anonimous/traditonal poetry and poems attributed to historical poets. These texts, which had a written form and therefore survived, are the main source to reconstruct the more general system of poetic comunication, which is the aim of the study of submerged literary dimension.