The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 2, The Late Republic
The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 2, The Late Republic

Author: E. J. Kenney

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1983-07-14

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9780521273749

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This volume covers the first three-quarters of the first century BC; an age which had enduring consequences for the subsequent history of Latin literature. The scene was dominated by two figures: Cicero and Catallus. This book shows how these and other Roman writers helped transform their traditional Greek models into new, vigorous Latin forms.

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 3, The Age of Augustus
The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 3, The Age of Augustus

Author: E. J. Kenney

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1983-07-14

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780521273732

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The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD 17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of what was best and most stimulating in earlier Greek and Roman writing, charged with new and original life by the individual genius of, most particularly, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Augustan literature, conventionally viewed as the expression in writing of the age itself - political and social stability reflected in artistic equilibrium - turns out on a close and critical reading to have been subject to the same stresses and strains as the society in and for which it was produced. In appraising the monumental literary achievements of the age the underlying tensions and contradictions are not ignored. The critical discussions in this volume do full justice to the complexity and subtlety of the literature itself.

Learned Girls and Male Persuasion
Learned Girls and Male Persuasion

Author: Sharon L. James

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-02-20

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0520233816

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"James shapes a new and original understanding of elegy. The author's agenda of foregrounding the viewpoint of the docta puella should stimulate major changes in the way that these poems are studied."—Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park "James provides a highly original reading of the elegiac genre. Her use of the docta puella as the focalizing point of her reading provides new insight into its fundamental nature…. The book would serve as an excellent introduction to the genre for undergraduates."—Paul Allen Miller, author of Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader "Learned Girls and Male Persuasion should be required reading for anyone teaching or studying the elegists. . . . [Sharon James] views the genre in the light of social reality, showing us what is ubiquitous and obvious in the poems if we take off the rose-colored glasses of romantic idealism: the facts of violence, rape, and abortion, and, above all, the fundamental tension between the erotic demands of the lover and the economic needs of the puella. Elegy will never be the same again."—Julia Gaisser, author of Catullus and his Renaissance Readers

Ovid
Ovid

Author: Sara Mack

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1968-01-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780300166514

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Of all the poets of ancient Rome Ovid had perhaps the most influence on the art and literature of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even today he is probably the most accessible of all classical poets to the non-specialist, both in his subject matter and in his style. Ovid is no less fascinated than we are by the human psyche and by the ways men and women relate to each other, and many of his views on these questions seem centuries ahead of his time. Ovid’s interest in narrative technique is so much like ours that modern critical terms such as “reader-response” could have been coined for his experiments with story telling. In the creation of different personae and points of view his ingenuity is endless. For the Amores he invented a posing poet-lover; for the Art of Love, his narrator is a cynical professor of seduction who is convinced, quite wrongly, that he has love down to a science. In the Heroides, a series of verse-letters from the famous women of legend to their lovers, he brilliantly recreated great moments of heroic mythology from the feminine point of view. The longest and most enchanting of his works, the Metamorphoses, an epic-length poem on the infinite changes of mythology and history, afforded him the richest opportunities of all to experiment with narrative techniques. In this book Sara Mack introduces Ovid to the general reader. After considering Ovid’s modernity, Mack surveys his poetry chronologically. Next she examines his most influential poems: the Amores, Heroides, Art of Love, and Metamorphoses. Finally she explores Ovidian wit, concluding with a look at Ovid’s influence on the arts.