The problematics of power

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The present volume is devoted to the ambivalent afterlife of Alexander the Great in a wide spectrum of literature and the arts. In East and West alike, representations of the soldier-king have served both to affirm the cultural values of the author/artist and to question them. This ability to be simultaneously a version of the self and of the other is especially interesting from the point of view of the East/West dichotomy - a dichotomy that the contributions to this volume both uphold (for example by their identification of the East with Islam, and of the West with Christendom) and subvert (for instance by cross-cultural emphases on the relativity of power).