Pastoral Inscriptions

Pastoral Inscriptions
Author: Brian W Breed
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-10-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1849668086

Virgil's "Eclogues" represent the introduction of a new genre, pastoral, to Latin literature. Generic markers of pastoral in the "Eclogues" include not only the representation of the singing and speaking of shepherd characters, but also the learned density of the text itself. Here, Brian W. Breed examines the tension between representations of orality in Virgil's pastoral world and the intense textuality of his pastoral poetry. The book argues that separation between speakers and their language in the "Eclogues" is not merely pastoral preciosity. Rather, it shows how Virgil uses representations of orality as the point of comparison for measuring both the capacity and the limitations of the "Eclogues" as a written text that will be encountered by reading audiences. The importance of genre is considered both in terms of how pastoral might be defined for the particular literary-historical moment in which Virgil was writing and in light of the subsequent European pastoral tradition.

Pastoral Inscriptions

Pastoral Inscriptions
Author: Brian W Breed
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-11-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1849668078

Virgil's "Eclogues" represent the introduction of a new genre, pastoral, to Latin literature. Generic markers of pastoral in the "Eclogues" include not only the representation of the singing and speaking of shepherd characters, but also the learned density of the text itself. Here, Brian W. Breed examines the tension between representations of orality in Virgil's pastoral world and the intense textuality of his pastoral poetry. The book argues that separation between speakers and their language in the "Eclogues" is not merely pastoral preciosity. Rather, it shows how Virgil uses representations of orality as the point of comparison for measuring both the capacity and the limitations of the "Eclogues" as a written text that will be encountered by reading audiences. The importance of genre is considered both in terms of how pastoral might be defined for the particular literary-historical moment in which Virgil was writing and in light of the subsequent European pastoral tradition.

Pastoral and the Humanities

Pastoral and the Humanities
Author: Mathilde Skoie
Publisher: Bristol Phoenix Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781904675587

Top international scholars in the field, including Paul Alpers and T.K. Hubbard, discuss the ways in which the pastoral tradition has been used and re-used in the Humanities, and assess the future of the pastoral genre.

Writing on the Renaissance Stage

Writing on the Renaissance Stage
Author: Frederick Kiefer
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1996
Genre: Books and reading
ISBN: 9780874135954

Playwrights also made extraordinary use of metaphors involving the written and printed word to describe the workings of the mind and the interaction of people.

Inscriptions and Their Uses in Greek and Latin Literature

Inscriptions and Their Uses in Greek and Latin Literature
Author: Peter Philip Liddel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2013-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199665745

From the archaic period onwards, ancient literary authors working within a range of genres discussed and quoted a variety of inscriptions. This volume offers a wide-ranging set of perspectives on the diversity of epigraphic material present in ancient literary texts, and the variety of responses, both ancient and modern, which they can provoke.

An Engraved Landscape: Rock carvings in the Wadi al-Ajal, Libya

An Engraved Landscape: Rock carvings in the Wadi al-Ajal, Libya
Author: Tertia Barnett
Publisher: British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies
Total Pages: 933
Release: 2023-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1900971402

An Engraved Landscape is a contextual analysis of a substantial new corpus of engravings from the Wadi al-Ajal, situated in the Central Saharan region of south west Libya. The wadi is renowned as the heartland of the Garamantian civilization, which emerged from local mobile Pastoral communities in the 1st millennium BC, and dominated trans-Saharan trade and politics for over a thousand years. Extensive archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations in recent years have provided detailed insight into the later prehistory and protohistory of the wadi and surrounding areas. However, prior to the fieldwork detailed in this work, only a handful of carvings had been recorded in the wadi. This work is based on systematic survey, conducted between 2004 and 2009, which recorded around 2,500 previously unknown or unpublished engraved and inscribed rock surfaces. All forms of engraving, whether figurative or surface markings, were viewed as significant residues of human interaction with the rock surface and were recorded. The resulting database provides an opportunity to analyze the engravings in relation to their changing physical and cultural contexts, and the discussion offers a fresh interpretation of Saharan rock art based on this substantial new evidence. An Engraved Landscape also captures in detail a unique heritage resource that is currently inaccessible and threatened. This record of the fragile engravings provides an important source of information for researchers and students.

Writing the Early Medieval West

Writing the Early Medieval West
Author: Elina Screen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2018-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 110818751X

Far from the oral society it was once assumed to have been, early medieval Europe was fundamentally shaped by the written word. This book offers a pioneering collection of fresh and innovative studies on a wide range of topics, each one representing cutting-edge scholarship, and collectively setting the field on a new footing. Concentrating on the role of writing in mediating early medieval knowledge of the past, on the importance of surviving manuscripts as clues to the circulation of ideas and political and cultural creativity, and on the role that texts of different kinds played both in supporting and in subverting established power relations, these essays represent a milestone in studies of the early medieval written word.

Virgil's Eclogues and the Art of Fiction

Virgil's Eclogues and the Art of Fiction
Author: Raymond Kania
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316538958

Many scholars have seen ancient bucolic poetry as a venue for thinking about texts and textuality. This book reassesses Virgil's Eclogues and their genre, arguing that they are better read as fiction - that is, as a work that refers not merely to itself or to other texts but to a world of its own making. This makes for a rich work of art and an object of legitimate aesthetic and imaginative engagement. Increased attention to the fictionality of Virgilian poetry also complicates and enriches the Eclogues' social and political dimensions. The book offers new interpretations of poems like Eclogues 5 and 9, which, according to traditional allegorical readings, concern Julius Caesar and the confiscation of lands under Octavian, respectively. It shows how the Eclogue world stands in a less stable relation to reality; these poems challenge readers at every turn to reimagine the relationship between fiction and the real.

Empire of Letters

Empire of Letters
Author: Stephanie Ann Frampton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190915412

Shedding new light on the history of the book in antiquity, Empire of Letters tells the story of writing at Rome at the pivotal moment of transition from Republic to Empire (c. 55 BCE-15 CE). By uniting close readings of the period's major authors with detailed analysis of material texts, it argues that the physical embodiments of writing were essential to the worldviews and self-fashioning of authors whose works took shape in them. Whether in wooden tablets, papyrus bookrolls, monumental writing in stone and bronze, or through the alphabet itself, Roman authors both idealized and competed with writing's textual forms. The academic study of the history of the book has arisen largely out of the textual abundance of the age of print, focusing on the Renaissance and after. But fewer than fifty fragments of classical Roman bookrolls survive, and even fewer lines of poetry. Understanding the history of the ancient Roman book requires us to think differently about this evidence, placing it into the context of other kinds of textual forms that survive in greater numbers, from the fragments of Greek papyri preserved in the garbage heaps of Egypt to the Latin graffiti still visible on the walls of the cities destroyed by Vesuvius. By attending carefully to this kind of material in conjunction with the rich literary testimony of the period, Empire of Letters exposes the importance of textuality itself to Roman authors, and puts the written word back at the center of Roman literature.