This authoritative volume offers a handy compilation of contributions to the field by its leading figures.

These essays treat a heterogeneous group of texts: alongside On the Sublime and How the young man should listen to poetry are an Attic comedy, a satyr play, a Plutarchan fragment, and the epitome of a lost work by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. It is a mixed bag, which is the point. Hunter offers "moments" in the history of criticism because we lack evidence to write a linear narrative . Given the lacunose record, he suggests the best way forward is (...) to lower the barrier separating "literary" from "critical" texts and to look for general patterns of similarity. Thereby he hopes to explain antiquity's predominantly "utilitarian" approach to literature, its "concern with what literature was for" . Although individual chapters show Hunter's characteristic inventiveness and wide range of reference, this reviewer found many of his claims overbroad. Indeed, the general approach recommended here seems less likely to enrich "our understanding of the ways in which the ancients sought to explain and use creative art" than to impede progress toward that worthy goal. (shrink)

Examines the connections between American philosophy and literature. This title includes discussion of subjects ranging from Stephen Crane's metaphysics to business ethics in William Dean Howells, pragmatic religion in Willa Cather and Harold Frederic, John Steinbeck's philosophy of work, and Norman Maclean's philosophy of community.

It is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one customarily calls its "reconstruction." The "reconstruction" in empathy is one- dimensional. "Construction" presupposes "destruction." Almost fourteen years after the death of Jacques Derrida, the least one can say is that his inheritance is as contested and fraught with rivalries, rejections, and appropriations as at the time of the flowering of Deconstruction in American universities in (...) the seventies and eighties. A halt was observed in 1988-89 after the posthumous revelations about Paul de Man's past in Belgium and Derrida's embattled defense of his friend. Today, in France, one often hears that "Derrida a fait l'Ecole mais n'a pas fait ecole," meaning that Derrida passed the entrance examination of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure where he taught for a long time, where he met Paul Celan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and many other luminaries, whereas he never had a real "school" in France-no real institutional backing beyond the various Parisian places at which he taught later, or those that he founded like the College de Philosophie; his following constituted of young philosophers, only a few of whom became university professors in their turn and disseminated his teachings. However, the mechanisms of power within the French university remained closed to Derrida until the end; besides, he wanted to prevent the stereotyped reproduction currently observed from master to disciple. (shrink)

Does Augustine put his finger on time? -- Time for history -- Determination -- Self-determination -- Time, knowledge and truth.

This book focuses on how we perceive, know and interpret culture across disciplinary boundaries. The study ranges from the Bible and classical works to those by and about men and women in Europe, the Americas and beyond of Native, African, European and different backgrounds.

In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as endemic but as an import from the East in the aftermath of military conquests--and as a cause of fatal decline. Following these etymological and semantic origins, Roman Luxuria: A Literary and Cultural (...) class='Hi'>History discusses the influence of Greek culture on the Roman concept and the peculiar characteristics of Roman luxuria. It analyses Roman views on luxuria through close readings in historical order from Cato the Elder, who regards luxuria as the opposite of the ideal Roman way of life, to the Christian poet Prudentius, who represents it in an allegorical fight with Sobriety. The book attends both to key authors and to wider literary genres, such as historiography and satire. Particular consideration is given to the rhetorical device of personification, which can be traced from the first appearances of luxuria in Latin literature to those of late antiquity. Berno devotes detailed attention to Seneca the Younger, whose work is often preoccupied with this passion. Seneca both defends himself from the charge of luxuria and violently attacks it in others, describing it as the archenemy of a philosophical life. Along the centuries, the focus on luxuria shifts from the economic sphere (and the waste of money) to the erotic, to the extent that in the Christian world it becomes one of the Seven Capital Sins representing the vice of lust. (shrink)

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to (...) form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century--from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements. (shrink)

Senshu University has hosted many international conferences on medieval English literature - primarily on Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland - as well as in the related fields of Old Germanic, medieval French and Renaissance Italian literature. These international collaborations inform and contribute to the present volume, which addresses the heritage bequeathed to medieval English language and literature by the classical world.<BR> This volume explores the development of medieval English literature in light of contact with Germanic (...) and Old Norse cultures, on the one hand, and Romance languages, on the other. The book includes a comparative study of <I>Beowulf in the Germanic context, discusses aspects of <I>Piers Plowman and its tradition, and offers philological approaches to Chaucer (especially his <I>Troilus and Criseyde). The articles assembled here collectively suggest how the torches of classical learning were carried from continental Europe to illuminate the pages of medieval English literature. (shrink)

I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the apologist (...) for imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered. Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

In this book, classicist Joshua Billings considers classical Greek drama as intellectual history. Developing an innovative approach to dramatic form as a mode of philosophical thought, Billings recasts early Greek intellectual history as a conversation across types of discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely-shared conceptual questions. He integrates evidence from tragedy, comedy, and satyr play into the development of early Greek philosophy in order to place poetry at the center of Greek thought. He (...) thus offers a substantially new history and map of classical intellectual culture: drama, on his view, appears as our best source for understanding the thought of the fifth century, while at the same time revealing significant tensions and anxieties in the development of philosophy. At the heart of the book is a novel approach to the philosophical qualities of drama. Though dramatists and their works have been considered philosophical in a variety of ways going back to antiquity, scholarly approaches have consistently taken "literature" and "philosophy" as defined categories, tracing more or less direct connections between one and the other. On the contrary, Billings argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" were available as stable categories in the fifth century. Rather he describes the way that drama treats issues that would come to be called philosophical, without relying on assumptions concerning what constitutes philosophical method or literary form. Drama develops a kind of method that allows it to pose and pursue conceptual questions in dramatic form which Billings describes as the "philosophical poetics" of drama. (shrink)

Selfhood and the Soul is a collection of new and original essays in honour of Christopher Gill, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. Although they all share the same concern - the experience of being a person and the question of how best to live - as in the work of the honorand himself they are distinguished by a diversity of approach and subject matter, taking the reader on a journey from ancient philosophy to medical writing (...) via discussions of topics as varied as money, love, free will, and cookery. (shrink)

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, (...) publishes original scholarly contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

The history of the opposition of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles is longer than is usually assumed. Similarly to the many of the other contrarian figures ascribed to Nietzsche, the Apollonian–Dionysian was not of his making; its history is much older and buried under a number of different layers of interpretation. In the following work I will discuss the formal aspects and content of their development, which took place under the direct authorial influence of Pseudo-Longinus, Jacob Bernays, Friedrich (...) Schiller, Fr. W. J. Schelling and Johan Jacob Bachofen. Still, although the discovery of a principle labelled das Dionysische doesn’t represent anything exceptional, the “Birth of Tragedy” treatise was a breakthrough: it began the development of a specific form of cultural critique, of which Nietzsche was the prime representative. (shrink)

In this bold book, Jonas Grethlein proposes a new dialogue between the fields of Classics and aesthetics. Ancient material, he argues, has the capacity to challenge and re-orientate current debates. Comparisons with modern art and literature help to balance the historicism of classical scholarship with transcultural theoretical critique. Grethlein discusses ancient narratives and pictures in order to explore the nature of aesthetic experience. While our responses to both narratives and pictures are vicarious, the 'as-if' on which they are (...) premised is specifically shaped by the form of the representation. Form emerges as a key to how narratives and pictures constitute an important means of engaging with experience. Combining theoretical reflections with close readings, this book will appeal to art historians as well as to textual scholars. (shrink)

Thinking about sensory experiences and evaluating human artifacts is an important part of Western European cultural and intellectual history. This book investigates from different perspectives the origins of this practice and the rich discourse of aesthetic value in classical antiquity.

The effect of music in Greek and Latin literature -- The impact and value of music according to ancient theorists -- The value of music in systematic analysis : philosophical and psychological considerations.

The Critical Circle investigates the celebrated hermeneutic circle, especially as it manifests itself in historical inquiry and literary criticism. Formulated variously in different theories of hermeneutics, the circle generally describes how, in the process of understanding an interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the while, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole. --from the Foreword.

This volume brings together modernity as a Western project. From the early, via the classic and high to the late modern period, each chapter reveals a marked interdisciplinary approach to the various aspects of this century-old process.

Drawing on ancient writers, from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and working farmer, Mark Usher compiles in this book an anthology of Greco-Roman passages illustrating how they thought about animals and illuminating they might help us to rethink our relationships with them. Not many contemporary readers will know, for example, the compelling arguments the second century AD Greek philosopher Porphyry makes for vegetarianism, long before a plant-based diet began to garner headlines. Plutarch's serio-comic exposition of the rationality and inherent dignity of (...) non-human creatures-put on the lips of one of Circe's pigs-is so fresh that it sounds like it was formulated just yesterday. The knowledge the poet Theognis derived from Greek sponge divers about the behavior of octopods rivals our contemporary fascination with the octopus. Aristotle's introduction to the scientific study of animal morphology and behavior remains unparalleled for its elegance and insight, and it represents one of the first forays into natural history writing. Seneca, employing an ingenious etymological pun on the word animal, endeavors to show that we humans are morally inferior to our animal cousins, who instinctively know and are satisfied with their place in Nature. The Greeks and Romans, amidst all their magnificent cultural achievements and reckless, destructive behavior, lived closer than most of us to the perils and prospects of their environments. This afforded them a sensitivity to their environments and, in particular, to their fellow creatures that can perhaps help to disabuse us of our disconnectedness from animal life. This small volume demonstrates how astoundingly relevant the ancients still are in this regard. (shrink)

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered 'Literary', the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, (...) Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes. (shrink)

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the main (...) focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites (...) us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

To write a history “from antiquity to the present” of classical art or literature (or, worst of all, classicism) is the ultimate nightmare aspiration for a scholar whose colleagues are attentive methodologists. The product, when there is one (which I add because the aspiration can yield paralysis), is always in part an apologetic treatise on historical method. Professor Vout—of Christ's College, Cambridge—apologizes with the first word of her subtitle, A, which stresses that many differing histories may be (...) as valid as her own. The next two words, Life History, imply that her study is unauthorized, conjectural, a bit personal or informal, and reliant to an extent on unconfirmable stories. Her book, she tells readers, is of necessity an arrangement of “fragments” and “a mapping not of facts, but of ways in which Greek and Roman artifacts experience history.” She sets down, moreover, as a rule that “classical” is not “a self-standing category: it is always relational” (which historians of the novel have been telling us for many decades about “realism”).We might expect the result of Vout's axioms to be evenhanded diffidence when treating definitions of the classical, and indeed she entertains even the idea of Jeff Koons—maker of Balloon Venus (Orange) and Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)—as a classical sculptor. There is, however, one approach that she dismisses out of hand: the obsession of classical humanism with authenticity and its renascence. She objects especially to research into the original conditions of objects and to the application of increasingly intrusive methods of restoring them. As she writes, “ ‘Real knowledge’ comes not from antiquities that have been ripped from their original context, cleaned and reconstituted for display in galleries and glass cabinets. ‘Real knowledge’ comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them.”What Vout, as a critic of humanism, means by dirt is patina—the residue, interesting and sometimes beautiful in itself, of the use and misuse of objects. Dirt is a word that would occur to a humanist art historian when examining the patina of a Greek or Roman object. Vout's use of the word is a parodic expression of reverse snobbery. When studying changes, whether mistakes or enhancements, in a Greek or Roman document, a humanist literary historian would speak of corruption and edit the corrupt text by means of processes that humanist editors invented and perfected. Despite the humanists’ devotion to the recovery of classical learning, however, once a Renaissance edition of a manuscript was in print, the original, however rare, was often destroyed or lost. In effect, the work was reborn, better than new. Rebirth is not the same as preservation: though both are perhaps conservative (or better, in Ulysses's words, “rere regardant”), a renascence or a resurrection is cataclysmic.The humanist approach to the past can appear unlovable and is certainly arrogant, but it can also inspire awe and gratitude. The work of Michelangelo depended on it, and so (more to the point) did Martin Luther's. Vout's attitude toward dirt (patina, corruption, misprision, insertions, recontextualizations, bowdlerizations, misappropriations, translocations) resembles that of Catholic theologians to the depositum fidei. Restoring the original conditions of the Christian church involved methods of research learned from Renaissance humanists and the removal, often destructive, of the “deposit” or residue or patina that adhered to, distorted, discolored, and obscured the conditions of the “primitive church.” A Roman Catholic may well dislike the processes that Luther set in motion, but imagine a scholarly history of Christianity that mentioned Protestantism only to regret its existence.Still, Vout's reasoning, it seems to me, is more sophisticated in its defense of dirt and in its criticism of restoration than any offered against the Protestants’ reasoning during the Counter-Reformation. Consider, for instance, this inspiring passage: “When the curators at the Munich Glyptothek removed Thorwaldsen's restorations from the Aegina pediments, they did not so much take them back to a pristine state as out of the feedback loop, rendering them damaged goods. It was not a restriction of avenues or a change of direction that was being enacted here, but a refusal to speak the language, or rather an insistence that the only language worth speaking was an academic [humanist, restorationist] one.... In 2011, the Glyptothek marked the two hundredth year of the pediments’ discovery by putting new versions of Thorvaldsen's restored figures on display. They had relearned the lingo. For art to be ‘classical,’ it has to know its place in the discourse.” May lingo and feedback loop have successful careers in the lexicon of classical scholarship. “Far from producing a nostalgic narrative,” as Vout informs us, “the lessons learned from looking back ensure that we keep traveling.”. (shrink)

Dialogue is a recurring and significant component of Indian religious and philosophical literature. Whether it be as a narrative account of a conversation between characters within a text, as an implied response or provocation towards an interlocutor outside the text, or as a hermeneutical lens through which commentators and modern audiences can engage with an ancient text, dialogue features prominently in many of the most foundational sources from classical India. Despite its ubiquity, there are very few studies that (...) explore this important facet of Indian texts. This book redresses this imbalance by undertaking a close textual analysis of a range of religious and philosophical literature to highlight the many uses and functions of dialogue in the sources themselves and in subsequent interpretations. Using the themes of encounter, transformation and interpretation - all of which emerged from face-to-face discussions between the contributors of this volume - each chapter explores dialogue in its own context, thereby demonstrating the variety and pervasiveness of dialogue in different genres of the textual tradition. This is a rich and detailed study that offers a fresh and timely perspective on many of the most well-known and influential sources from classical India. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, Asian studies, comparative literature and literary theory. (shrink)

This comprehensive Handbook presents the major perspectives within philosophy and literary studies on the relations, overlaps and tensions between philosophy and literature. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and literature, literary theory, philosophical aesthetics, literature as philosophy and philosophy as literature, its twenty-nine chapters plus substantial Introduction and Afterword examine the ways in which philosophy and literature depend on each other and interact, while also contrasting with each other in that they necessarily exclude or incorporate (...) each other. This book establishes an enduring framework for structuring the broad themes defining the relations between philosophy and literature and organising the main topics in the field. Key Features • Structured in five parts addressing philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophical aesthetics, literary criticism and theory, and main areas of work within philosophy and literature • An Introduction setting out the main concerns of the field through discussion of the major themes along with the individual topics • An Afterword looking at the interactions between philosophy and literature through itself enacting philosophical and literary writing while examining the question of how they can be brought together The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature is an essential resource for scholars, researchers and advanced students in philosophy of literature, philosophy as literature, literary theory, literature as philosophy, and the philosophical aesthetics of literature. It is an ideal volume for researchers, advanced students and scholars in philosophy, literary studies, philosophy and literature, cultural studies, classical studies and other related fields. (shrink)

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of (...) 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature provides a comprehensive, critical survey of the literature of Greece and Rome from Homer till the Fall of Rome. This is the only modern work of this scope; it embodies the very considerable advances made by recent classical scholarship, and reflects too the increasing sophistication and vigour of critical work on ancient literature. The literature is presented throughout in the context of the culture and the social and (...) hisotircal processes of which it is an integral part. The overall aim is to offer an authoritative work of reference and appraisal for one of the world's greatest continuous literary traditions. The work is divided into two volumes, each with a similar and broadly chronological structure. Among the special features are important introductory chapters by the General Editors on 'Books and Readers', discussing the conditions under which literature was written and read in antiquity. There are also extensive Appendices or Authors and Works giving detailed factual information in a convenient form. Technical annotation is otherwise kept to a minimum, and all quotations in foreign languages are translated. (shrink)

This book offers timely contributions to the process of conceptualizing a Latin American specificity and its forms of integration in larger contexts, both on the level of thought and the level of political and social praxis. To produce a critical reading of philosophy while also developing a philosophy of criticism is essential in cultures that continue to struggle for the decolonization of both thought and life. This book allows Anglophone readers access to the world of ideas of some of the (...) most relevant Latin American thinkers of our age. Through a comprehensive discussion of the works and contexts of thinkers such as of José Carlos Mariátegui, Enrique Dussel, Bolívar Echeverría, and Roger Bartra to Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Peter Sloterdijk, Mabel Moraña demonstrates that Latin American thought has not only been inseparable from Western philosophy but also from the determinants of its history and social struggles. By doing so, Mabel Moraña provides an extensive perspective on the connections between historical moments, social structures, and discursive practices. With its interdisciplinary focus, this book will be an important resource for scholars and students in Latin American studies, comparative literature, world literature, and philosophy. (shrink)

This series provides individual textbooks on early Greek poetry, on Greek drama, on philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and of the Empire. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index. This volume studies the revolutionary movement represented by the more creative of the Hellenistic poets and finally the very rich range of authors surviving from the imperial period, with rhetoric and the (...) novel contributing a distinctive flavour to the culture of the time. Appropriately enough, the volume closes with a survey of books and readers in the ancient world, which draws attention to the bookish nature of Greek literature from the Hellenistic period onwards and points forward to its survival into the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This volume covers a relatively short span of time, rather less than the first three-quarters of the first century BC; but it was an age of profoundly important developments, with enduring consequences for the subsequent history of Latin literature. Original and innovative in widely differing ways as was the work of Lucretius, Sallust and Caesar in particular, the scene is dominated, historically, by two figures: Cicero and Catullus. Cicero was a politician and a man of affairs as well (...) as a man of latters, whose vast literary output reflects a range of intellectual interests unparalleled among surviving Roman writers; creator of a prose style the Quintilian regarded as synonymous with eloquence itself; and better known to us, from his letters, as a human being, than any other figure from classical antiquity. Catullus was a poet, single-mindedly devoted to fostering the tradition of learned Alexandrian poetry at Rome; the author of one slender volume of verse that has attracted more critical attention in proportion to its size than any other ancient poetry-book; and the lover of Lesbia. In these chapters it is shown how these, and other, Roman writers of genius continued the process of transforming their traditional Greek models into new and vigorous Latin forms, with lasting effects for oratory, historiography, and the higher genres of poetry. (shrink)