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Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil addresses one of the fundamental questions regarding any literary pursuit: How shall we read? Basing his methodology on the philosophy of Martin Buber, R. A. Smith advances the notion that poets who allude to their predecessors "embrace" the text of their models. Allusion need not, strictly speaking, be looked at as a process of poetry, but can be seen as a high regard for the texts that precede it in the literary tradition. Ancient authors kept their readers in mind as they worked, and they constructed their texts in such a way as to create a certain role or roles for their readers.
R. A. Smith considers the relationship of the two major writers of Augustan epic, Ovid and Virgil, and he offers a selective treatment of Ovidian allusion to Virgil: he comments on the insights about Ovid's reading of the Aeneid that these allusions suggest. He discusses such readership in terms of modern hermeneutics and examines the readership at certain junctures in their texts. Smith ranges widely in his treatment of these and other topics, offering valuable insights not only about the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses, but about virtually all of Virgil's and Ovid's poetry, and about questions of readership and poetic immortality as well. In conclusion, he argues that the texts of Ovid and Virgil construct their own readership, and he demonstrates this by comparing several textual examples of contemporary Pompeian friezes that themselves suggest a role for the viewer.
Throughout the book Smith's approach to familiar questions and familiar passages is unique, and he offers a fresh approach to poetic allusion and readership in general. Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil not only deals with the texts of the classical poets Ovid and Virgil but also encompasses broader issues of readership. It will be of interest to scholars and teachers of literature in general, as well as to classicists.
R. A. Smith is Assistant Professor of Classics, Baylor University.
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The relationship between the author and his audience has received much critical attention from scholars in non-classical disciplines in recent years, yet the nature of much ancient literature and of its 'publication' meant that audiences in ancient times were more immediate to their authors than in the modern world. This book contains essays by distinguished scholars on the various means by which Latin authors communicated effectively with their audiences. The authors and works covered are Cicero (as both orator and letter-writer), Catullus, Lucretius, Propertius, Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Senecan tragedy, Persius, Pliny's letters, Tacitus' Annals and medieval love lyric. Contributors have provided detailed analyses of particular passages in order to throw light on the many different ways in which authors catered for their audiences by fulfilling, manipulating and thwarting their expectations; and in an epilogue the editors have drawn together the issues raised by these contributions and have attempted to place them in an appropriate critical context. Author and Audience in Latin Literature is a sequel to the influential series of essay-collections edited by Tony Woodman and David West and published by Cambridge University Press: Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry (1974), Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (1979) and Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus (1984). ... Read more

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Ths book is an advanced introduction to Horace that treats his whole poetic career and all of the genres in which he worked. Oliensis focuses on the social dimensions of Horace's poetry, considering how Horace shaped his poems and his books to promote his authority while also paying deference to his eminent patrons. The combination of scope, social emphasis, and theoretically informed close readings is what distinguishes this book from other current treatments of Horace. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A must for classicists.
Brilliant, but one expects no less from Oliensis.

Worth it for Horace scholars.
Brilliant, but one expects no less from Oliensis. ... Read more

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“This book is a creative and timely contribution to scholarship on the Silvae. H. amasses an impressive array of evidence which will be of value to anyone concerned with poetry or with rhetoric in the early empire.” (Classical Review 34 (1984) 190-92)

Although writing in Latin, Statius (first-century AD) was, by origin and training, a Greek poet, and his collection of "occasional" poems, the Silvae, are a Roman extension of contemporary trends in Greek display poetry. No accurate reading of the Silvae can be made without an understanding of this Graeco-Roman poetic milieu.

This book therefore begins with a reconstruction of the professional background to the Silvae - the festival circuit, the conditions of work for writers, their opportunities for advancement in the Greek and Roman worlds - both in the Hellenistic period and in the first century A.D. In this setting, display oratory and poetry are shown to have developed in parallel and to have had a profound mutual influence. Further chapters consider Statius' performances as a Neapolitan poet at Rome, his portrayal of his own society and his friends, and his attitudes to his Latin predecessors.

Literary patronage, both imperial and private, is a vital element in Statius' poetic career, and Hardie goes on to investigate the identity and social standing of the addressees of the Silvae. He also considers the career of the contemporary epigrammatist Martial in comparison to that of Statius. Many essential features of Flavian taste emerge from these studies.

Large-scale interpretations of individual poems are offered throughout this volume, making many new suggestions about both points of detail and the overall significance of the major poems in the Silvae.

Statius and the Silvae is an important contribution to the debate on the relationship between poetry and rhetoric, and to the understanding of how society and literature interconnected in the Flavian age. ... Read more

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Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gillespie writes a bibliographical history of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his follower John Lydgate in the century after the arrival of printing in England. Her study is an important new contribution to the emerging "sociology of the text" in English literary and historical studies.

At the center of this study is a familiar question: what is an author? The idea of the vernacular writer was already contested and unstable in medieval England; Gillespie demonstrates that in the late Middle Ages it was also a way for book producers and readers to mediate the risks--commercial, political, religious, and imaginative--involved in the publication of literary texts.

Gillespie's discussion focuses on the changes associated with the shift to print, scribal precedents for these changes, and contemporary understanding of them. The treatment of texts associated with Chaucer and Lydgate is an index to the sometimes flexible, sometimes resistant responses of book printers, copyists, decorators, distributors, patrons, censors, owners, and readers to a gradual but profoundly influential bibliographical transition.

The research is conducted across somewhat intractable boundaries. Gillespie writes about medieval and modern history; about manuscript and print; about canonical and marginal authors; about literary works and books as objects. In the process, she finds new meanings for some medieval vernacular texts and a new place for some old books in a history of English culture. ... Read more

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This brilliant collection aims to tell the story of classical literature: how it developed, flourished, and changed throughout the ages.The individual essays, which constitute the main body of the book, give for each of the fifty authors a substantial introduction to the author's life, works, and cultural and social positions.The essays collectively create an overall sense of the main periods of the flowering classical culture, and of the significance of historical events which affected it. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A very literary history
The classical world of Greece and Rome furnished early written works in poetry, philosophy, mathematics, history, plays, and the natural sciences.By explaining the lives of FIFTY KEY CLASSICAL AUTHORS, this book gives the historical setting in which intertextuality had 1,000 years of allusion and the dynamics of appropriation to produce meanings which were not isolated but interactive.I would consider the authors of this book young, as the Notes at the end of the Introduction reveal that a book on Virgil by Otis which was published in 1964 was written "before either of the authors of this book were born."(p. xxi).

Back in 1964, I was taking Latin in high school, but my high school only offered two years of Latin, so after tenth and eleventh grades, I gave it up.I avoided reading the great Greek plays studied by the honors students at the University of Michigan in 1965-66 by enrolling in the College of Engineering, which had its own English courses, in which ancient civilizations were not the key to what we were supposed to learn, though writing one paper about something that was supposed to be funny was as challenging as sticking to the factual approach for which technocrats would become famous, in the event they ever escaped being anonymous.

Philosophy is much more aware of its origin in the Greek world, and Plato and Aristotle show up in this book, after the early poets, writers of the great tragedies, a historian, the comic Aristophanes, "the best of the writers of Old Comedy," (p. 84), a speechwriter who is called a logographer, and the versatile Xenophon, who even gets credit for writing "Socratic texts."(p. 103).Socrates was not a writer, so he is not discussed as a main character in FIFTY KEY CLASSICAL AUTHORS, but the index reveals that he was mentioned on 16 pages, similar to Suetonius, who is mentioned on 15 pages before having his own section on pages 365-70.

The index is mainly names, with more people than places.Many names which appear in the text are not to be found in the index, especially names of two words.Though "the epic poet Silius Italicus" (p. 274) can be found in the index between Sicily and similes on page 420, modern names are listed under the last name, as in Shakespeare, William; Shelley, Mary; and Shelley, Percy.There is an Alphabetical List of Contents on pages viii-ix in which Julius Caesar appears between Aristotle and Callimachus, then Cassius Dio before Catullus.In the index, the first entry starting with a C is Calabria, and Julius Caesar shows up between Julia (daughter of Augustus) and Juno on page 417.

There is no listing in the index for mathematics, but plenty for madness, manuscripts, marriage, Megalopolis, metaphor, metre, misogyny, mothers, Muses, and mutiny.Following a single entry for Rabelais, there are multiple pages for readers, reading, realism, reception, recognition, a single entry for recusatio, many for repetition, revenge and reversal of fortune/peripeteia, but only a few for Rhodes and ring composition.

Occasionally the point of view in FIFTY KEY CLASSICAL AUTHORS is very British.In discussing Seneca the Younger, "whose work dominated the Roman literary scene of the first century AD," (p. 301), the book introduces him by saying, "However, it was during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras that Seneca really came into his own.Seneca's tragedies superseded their Greek models, which were less accessible to a community who knew Latin much better than Greek."(p. 300).For those who missed seeinga recent performance, take comfort in knowing that the 1968 adaptation of Seneca's OEDIPUS by Ted Hughes "was revived in April 1998 at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter."(p. 301).My interest in Seneca might be like Ezra Pound's, who wrote about him in his ABC OF READING in 1934, in which Pound "saw Seneca's writings as symptomatic of a nation `losing a grip of its empire and of itself.'Yet Pound's condemnation of Seneca didn't prevail."(p. 301).Could it be that the authors of this book stopped their timeline with the "Death of Cassius Dio" in post-AD 229 (p. 411) because they are not fond of those who blame the Roman Empire for falling apart?Perhaps they want us to think that they do not approve or are not familiar with a history of Rome called HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, by someone named Edward Gibbon, who does not appear in the index of this book.This book might be better than that one for people who are looking for useful information, but decline can also be found in the index of this book.Even the works of Homer are not unaware of the fall of Troy, and the fall of Carthage gets a few sympathic words from the writers in this book who thought that Rome might well be damned by the rest of the world for doing something like that, so arrogant. ... Read more

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This volume seeks to contribute to medieval scholarship by establishing that within his writings, Hartmann von Aue addresses a problem characteristic of his period, "Gott und der Welt gefallen", by fusing the quest for secular happiness as it is presented in the heroic literatures of ancient and medieval times with the search for spiritual happiness as it is depicted by St Augustine in his "Civitas Dei". In the discussion of the quest for "saelde" within Hartmann's works, it aims to establish the pilgrimage motif as his main tectonic principle and most significant action motif. The examination of Hartmann's tectonic principle also documents the ideologized transformation of the pilgrimage motif as a progression from the somewhat stark dualism of his "Kreuzzugslieder" to the gradualism in "Gregorius" and "Der arme Heinrich" and marks a peak of gothic style and ideology in the medieval epic tradition. ... Read more

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The late Middle English Weye of Paradys and its French source LaVoie de Paradis use the theme of the allegorical journey to Paradise.Essentially they are popular guides to confession, adaptations for the laymanof more specialized works in Latin such as Raymond of Pennaforte's Summade Poenitentia.This edition presents critical texts of both The Weye of Paradys andLa Voie de Paradis and analyzes the relations of the English text with itsimmediate (French) and distant (Latin) sources.This work makes the English and French texts available in print for the firsttime and places them in the wider field of popular penitential literature. ... Read more

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From c. 1100 until c. 1170, Latin prosimetrical texts characterized by dialogue, allegory, and philosophical speculation enjoyed a notable popularity within the cultural ambit of the French cathedral schools. Inspired by Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy", the prosimetrum writers applied his literary techniques to the ethical and anthropological concerns of their own era, producing texts of great artistry in the process. This book investigates the rise of the Boethian impulse in Latin, the innovations of the twelfth-century writers, the difficulties that arose when they attempted to recapture the certainty that characterized the Consolation, and the survival of aspects of this literary mode in later Latin and vernacular literature. ... Read more

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This book is the first critical edition of the Latin poem Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, by Gilo of Paris and a second anonymous author, translated for the first time into English and accompanied by a detailed historical and linguistic commentary. Significant for its links with the vernacular Chanson d'Antioch, the poem illustrates how quickly a theological and cultural understanding of the first crusade developed after the events themselves and shows how soon the leaders of the crusades came to be regarded as `heroes'. ... Read more

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This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Journalism; Language Arts & Disciplines / Publishing; Literary Collections / Ancient, Classical & Medieval; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Reference / Bibliographies & Indexes; ... Read more

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The poet David Slavitt is one of the handful of great translators we have. He is certainly the most versatile. Now he has put himself to the beautiful labor of translating poems from the Greek Anthology. As is the case in all of his translations, the reader finds an absolute clarity of utterance as he moves from one great poet's voice to another's. What he has given us is a treasury of Greek poetry to be read again and again. Pure gold.
David Slavitt has also translated for Sheep Meadow Press the work of the Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira, about which has been written, "There is something of the carnival in Bandeira's poetry, a wild celebration...He is a poet of revelation, mystery and strangely ironic humor." ... Read more

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This is a collection of classic Chinese poems. An introduction explains the tradition, images, themes and development of Chinese poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Chinese poems translated by a Chinese scholar
This is my first book of Chinese poems translated by a Chinese scholar. The selections are quite interesting, as I came across many poems and poets I didn't know before. Many of the love/lost love poems are quite intense: "Lament of the Autumn Fan" by Lady Ban, "The Deserted Lover" by Li Qun-Yu, "Grief in Autumn" by Lu Lun, and most of all the "Phoenix Hairpin" poems by Lu Yu and his lost lover Tang Wan. There was also interesting social commentary such as "A Year of War" by Cao Dao-Rong, and "The Peaseants" by Li Shen.

Highly Recommended.

Comparisons: Tony Barnstone, Kenneth Rexroth, Greg Wincup

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This is a one-volume reprinted edition with corrections and a new foreword of D. R. Shackleton Bailey's acclaimed translation of Cicero's letters, previously appearing in two volumes. It includes an introduction, appendices on Roman history, glossaries, maps, and a concordance. ... Read more

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The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements. ... Read more

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Beginning with an examination of the different stages of women's lives--childhood, virginity, marriage and widowhood, this Companion addresses various aspects of medieval life that affected women's writing.These include the nature of authorship in the period, the position of women at home or in nunneries, and their relationship to religion. Additional essays cover the lives and work of such prominent women writers as Heloise, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Joan of Arc. A chronology and guides to further reading add information which students and scholars will find invaluable. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

great information and organization
I really like this book, although I have not read it all yet.Some of the articles are quite short, though.Overall, I believe it is a great investment! ... Read more

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`This affordable, engaging and important translation of Teresa de Cartagena's works significantly expands and enriches the current canon of medieval women writers.' ANNE CLARK BARTLETT, DePAUL UNIVERSITYTeresa de Cartagena was born in Burgos in about 1415-20, into a powerful family of Jewish origin. All we know of Teresa comes from her work: she was deaf and not physically strong, she was a nun, and - perhaps the source of her resilience -she was well-educated, above all in religion and moral philosophy. Deaf from early womanhood, her consolatory treatise Grove of the Infirm is a reflection on the spiritual benefits of illness; her second work, Wonder at the Works of God, was apparently written to counter the contention of her critics that a handicapped woman had nothing of value to say. This artful manipulation of the familiar devotional genre of `the treatise of consolation' reveals a woman writer intimately familiar with the cultural practices of her era; overall, both works allow a rare glimpse into the world of women in fifteenth-century Spain.Dr DAYLE SEIDENSPINNER-NUNEZ teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. ... Read more