Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Robert H. F. Carver

This book provides a comprehensive account of the reception of The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, the only work of Latin prose fiction worthy of the name of ‘novel’ to ... More

This book provides a comprehensive account of the reception of The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, the only work of Latin prose fiction worthy of the name of ‘novel’ to survive intact from the ancient world. Apuleius' 2nd-century account of the curious young man who is changed into a donkey following an affair with a witch's slave-girl, and undergoes a series of adventures (involving robbery, adultery, buggery, and bestiality) before a divine vision transforms him into a disciple of the goddess Isis, has delighted, perplexed, and inspired readers as diverse as St Augustine, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. This book traces readers' responses to the novel from the 3rd to the 17th centuries in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and England. Less

R. O. A. M. Lyne: Collected Papers on Latin Poetry

R. O. A. M. Lyne

S. J. Harrison (ed.)

This book collects the papers of Oliver Lyne, and was conceived by a group of his former pupils and colleagues as a memorial to Oliver. To make it the more accessible, effective, and ... More

This book collects the papers of Oliver Lyne, and was conceived by a group of his former pupils and colleagues as a memorial to Oliver. To make it the more accessible, effective, and compact, it was eventually decided to omit papers which were particularly short or technical, or which had been superseded through Oliver's later work or changes of view. Oliver's output may be grouped into three periods: the first (A) from the beginning to the publication of The Latin Love Poets (1980); the second (B) from 1983 to the publication of Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (1995); the third (C) the papers that followed. The papers (like the books) present a striking concentration on the most well-known period of Latin poetry, from c.60 BC to c.20 AD, and show particular concern with the relation of personal and public poetry. Period A is chiefly preoccupied with personal poetry, which is conceived as reflecting actual personality and opinions. Period B deals with poetry which seems to present a public and Augustan stance. This stance, however, is undermined; undermining indeed (with its more devious congeners) forms perhaps the central concern in Lyne's analysis of poetry. The return to avowedly or professedly personal poetry in period C now gives more emphasis to its literary forms and structures, and to intertextuality. Less

Reflections in a Serpent's Eye: Thebes in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Micaela Janan

Ovid's extraordinary story of Thebes' founding and bloody unravelling spans Books 2 and 3 of his epic poem, the Metamorphoses. His bizarre refractions of the well‐ordered community ... More

Ovid's extraordinary story of Thebes' founding and bloody unravelling spans Books 2 and 3 of his epic poem, the Metamorphoses. His bizarre refractions of the well‐ordered community mirror Ovid's own Rome and the mythohistory of its origins, most particularly as framed in Vergil's Aeneid. The Aeneid has regularly been read as, demonstrating how and why Rome will stride forward into history and an ‘empire without end’. This book uses the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan to argue that The Metamorphoses' strangely fantastical surface reflects what is already inherently perverse in that master‐narrative and discloses its internal contradictions. Ovid's Thebes features supernatural transformations, perverse fascinations, and violent end: Actaeon turned deer and the victim of his own hounds, Narcissus fatally captivated by his own image, Pentheus ripped apart by his mother and aunt. Ovid's reflections on how and why Thebes comes together—and how it comes unstuck—sceptically interrogate not only the existing (Roman) political order, claimed asiasting truth, but also the very possibility of organizing any polity into a harmonious, organically unified, lasting institution. Ovid thus poses doubts and questions crucial to the whole epic genre and its stress on collective identity as a function of a particular city‐state. His Metamorphoses probes the logical principles of the ordered human community—its cohesion, identity, and governance—revealing a hidden bond between the epic Doomed City (Troy, Thebes, Carthage) and the City of Manifest Destiny (Rome). In Ovid's ‘tale of two cities’ each logically defines and suppors the other. By asking, ‘What does it mean to be a polity? a citizen of a polity?’, Ovid poses questions centred upon the concept of identity. His Theban cycle thus asks even more radically, ‘What is identity? What shapes it? What changes it?’ To explicate Ovid's critique of epic nationalism and identity, a series of close readings of episodes from Books 3 and 4 draws upon psychoanalysis as a body of thought devoted to unfolding just how an unconscious constantly subverts notions of individual and collective selfhood. Psychoanalysis offers the conceptual basis for seeing the questions Ovid's Thebes inspires as facets of one problematic, revealing the singularity of Ovid's foundation‐tale as more rich and complex than previously appreciated. Less

The Roman World of Cicero's De Oratore

Elaine Fantham

This book studies Cicero's first and fullest dialogue, on the ideal orator-statesman. It illustrates the dialogue's achievement as a reflection of a civilized way of life and a ... More

This book studies Cicero's first and fullest dialogue, on the ideal orator-statesman. It illustrates the dialogue's achievement as a reflection of a civilized way of life and a brilliantly constructed literary unity, and considers the contribution made by Cicero's recommendations to the development of rhetoric and higher education at Rome. Because Cicero deliberately set his extended conversation in the generation of his childhood teachers, a study of the dialogue in its historical setting can show how the political and cultural life of this earlier period differed from Cicero's personal experience of the collapse of senatorial government, when the overwhelming power of the ‘first triumvirate’ forced him into political silence in the last decade of the republic. After an introductory chapter reviewing Cicero's position on return from exile, chapters include a comparative study of the careers of M. Antonius and L. Licinius Crassus, protagonists of the dialogue, a discussion of Cicero's response to Plato's criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, and his debt to Aristotle's Rhetoric, analysis of the dialogue's treatment of Roman civil law, existing Latin literature and historical writing, Strabo's survey of the sources and application of humour, political eloquence in senate and contio, theories of diction and style, and the techniques of oral delivery. An epilogue looks briefly at Cicero's De re publica and Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus as reflections on the transformation of oratory and free (if oligarchic) republican government by debate to meet the context of the new autocracy. Less

Romans and Romantics

Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, Mathilde Skoie (eds)

This book provides discussion of the relationship between Romanticism and Roman antiquity. Encompassing literature, music, sculpture, film, history, politics, and scholarship, it ... More

This book provides discussion of the relationship between Romanticism and Roman antiquity. Encompassing literature, music, sculpture, film, history, politics, and scholarship, it assesses the influence that ancient Roman culture has had upon Romanticism, and that Romanticism has had upon the understanding of the ancient Romans up to the present day. Part One takes a selection of general themes and motifs — republicanism, time, originality, and love — and assesses how these themes and motifs circulate between Roman antiquity and Romanticism. Part Two contains case-studies of specific engagements between those who were alive in the so-called Romantic Period and specific aspects of Roman antiquity. Part Three then evaluates the reception of Romanticism in authors, writings, operas, and films that appeared after, and in full consciousness of, the formulation of this concept; it considers how these receptions are in turn shaped by and shaping the simultaneous reception of the ancient Romans. By highlighting in this way the key role that the Romans played in the creation and development of Romanticism, and that Romanticism has since played in conceptions of the Romans, this book initiates not only a reassessment of the relationship between its two protagonists, but a new understanding of each of them individually. Less

Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832

Jonathan Sachs

Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars ... More

Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle‐18th century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has arisen in the context of the articulation of a modernity distinguished either by its full‐scale rejection of classical precedents or by its embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical understanding produced a changed conceptualization of the Roman past for Romantic writers, and transformative because Rome became the locus for new understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book asserts the centrality of Rome in a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti‐democratic, or “right royal.” By exposing how Roman references help structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacts fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book initiates a major overhaul in how we understand the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle. Less

S-Stem Nouns and Adjectives in Greek and Proto-Indo-European: A Diachronic Study in Word Formation

Torsten Meissner

This book deals with one aspect of Greek and Proto-Indo-European nominal morphology: the formation, inflection, and semantics of s-stem nouns and adjectives. It uncovers the mechanisms ... More

This book deals with one aspect of Greek and Proto-Indo-European nominal morphology: the formation, inflection, and semantics of s-stem nouns and adjectives. It uncovers the mechanisms of their creation and shows their limitation. The established view that the nouns are an unproductive category is challenged; at the same time, the expanding and partly changing nature of the basis governing the creation of the adjectives is explained. Morphology and semantics are studied in tandem, and a large chronological span of the Greek language is covered. The historical side is then extended into prehistory, and in particular the Greek evidence is tested against recent theories on Proto-Indo-European ablaut, leading to a reassessment of the morphonological characteristics in question. Less

Sibylline Sisters: Virgil's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing

Fiona Cox

The history of Virgil and his receptions is long and varied. His 20th-century career transformed his appearance as an anaemic imitator of Homer into the ‘Father of the West’, speaking ... More

The history of Virgil and his receptions is long and varied. His 20th-century career transformed his appearance as an anaemic imitator of Homer into the ‘Father of the West’, speaking above all for the marginalized and exiled. At the turn of the millennium it is women writers who, having been largely absent from the story of Virgil's reception, are for the first time shaping a new aetas Vergiliana by drawing on his poems to speak of their own preoccupations and concerns. Through an analysis of Virgil's presence in the work of contemporary women writers from North America (Joyce Carol Oates, Janet Lembke, Ursula Le Guin), Britain (Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Ruth Fainlight, Michèle Roberts, Carol Ann Duffy, U. A. Fanthorpe, Josephine Balmer), Ireland (Eavan Boland), and continental Europe (Christa Wolf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, and Monique Wittig), this book identifies a new Virgil: one who speaks in female tones of the anxieties, exclusions, pleasures, and threats of the contemporary world. While each of the female writers included in this volume draws upon her own distinct cultural heritage, the book focuses on a number of shared themes and values which emerge through their work. Less

Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy

Simon Goldhill

This book offers a revolutionary take on Sophocles’ tragic language – and on how we talk about tragedy as a genre. The first section explores how Sophocles excitingly develops the ... More

This book offers a revolutionary take on Sophocles’ tragic language – and on how we talk about tragedy as a genre. The first section explores how Sophocles excitingly develops the resources of Greek tragedy: it looks at Sophocles’ manipulation of irony, his construction of dialogue, his deployment of the actors, the role of the chorus, and reveals the playwright’s distinctive brilliance. The second section explores how the critical understanding of tragedy as a genre developed in the nineteenth century: how did Victorian critics develop a distinctive way of talking about irony, the chorus, the development of the actor’s role? Goldhill reveals the deep debt of modern critics to their nineteenth-century forebears. Finally, the book explores the foundational question of literary criticism raised by these two sections: how historical, how historically self-conscious should a reading of Greek tragedy be? This book makes a telling contribution to the discussion of tragedy, of literary criticism, and of how the past is understood. Less