The Grotesque in Roman Love Elegy

The Grotesque in Roman Love Elegy
Author: Mariapia Pietropaolo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108802923

Roman elegy makes frequent use of themes of ugliness and disfigurement, juxtaposing them with images of ideal beauty and sentiment. In order to overcome the obstacles to his erotic relationship, the poet-lover repeatedly represents his rivals and opponents in such a way as to ridicule their appearance and to degrade their social standing. This book explores the theme of corporeal, intellectual, and social degradation from a perspective attentive to the aesthetic significance of the grotesque imagery with which such degradation is accomplished. Although there has been sophisticated discussion of the use of grotesque imagery in genres like comedy, invective, and satire, which are concerned in part with themes of transgression and excess, Mariapia Pietropaolo demonstrates that the grotesque plays a significant role in the self-definition of love elegy, the genre in which it is least expected.

The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy

The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy
Author: Thea S. Thorsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2013-11-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1107511747

Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an accessible introduction for the general reader interested in Latin love elegy and the history of love and lament in Western literature, as well as a collection of critically stimulating essays for students and scholars of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.

The Latin Love Elegists

The Latin Love Elegists
Author: Hunter H. Gardner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 101
Release: 2023-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004688153

Latin love elegy’s flourishing concurrent with Rome’s transition from Republic to Principate has remained an issue central to scholarship on the genre since the turn of the last millennium. This book addresses the Greco-Roman literary inheritance and Augustan socio-political context that paved the way for that flourishing, while examining the genre’s key elements and characters as illustrated in the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and Sulpicia. Special attention is paid to the gendered dynamics that govern the relationship between “poet-lover” (amator) and beloved and to the role of the poet as artist and creator of a “written girl” (scripta puella).

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism
Author: Donald Pizer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1995-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521438766

This Companion examines a number of issues related to the terms realism and naturalism. The introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of previous efforts to make the terms expressive of American writing of this period. The Companion includes ten essays which fall into four categories: essays on the historical context of realism and naturalism by Louis Budd and Richard Lehan; essays on critical approaches to the movements since the early 1970s by Michael Anesko, essays on the efforts to expand the canon of realism and naturalism by Elizabeth Ammons; and a full-scale discussion of ten major texts, from W. D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to Jack London's The Call of the Wild, by John W. Crowley, Tom Quirk, J. C. Levenson, Blanche Gelfant, Barbara Hochman, and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin.

Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy

Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy
Author: T. E. Franklinos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2024-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198908113

This Festschrift in honour of the classical scholar Stephen Heyworth brings together eleven experts on the genre of Latin elegy. All chapters focus on the close reading of elegiac texts primarily by Ovid and Propertius.

Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy

Essays on Propertian and Ovidian Elegy
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2024-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019890813X

This volume brings together eleven chapters on the genre of Latin elegy by leading scholars in the field. Latin elegy is typically thought to have flourished for a brief period at Rome between c. 40 BC and the early decades of the first century AD; it was the pre-eminent vehicle for writing about amatory matters in this period and among its principal exponents were Propertius and Ovid, whose works constitute the focus of this volume. Their poems and poetic collections were, however, by no means restricted to the themes of love, even if amatory concerns often surface at unexpected moments in texts that are not ostensibly concerned with love. Both poets were alive to their precursors' writings in elegiacs, and so aetiological themes and reflection on contemporary political circumstances form an integral part of their poetry. Such concerns are explored in some of the chapters on Propertius, on Ovid's Fasti and exile poetry, and also in a Renaissance elegy that looks closely to its literary heritage as it comments on the concerns of its day. Some contributions to this volume also shed new light on the typically elegiac conceit of separation, notably in amatory and exilic texts, while others look to conceptions of Roman identity and the relationship between the natural world and the cultural, political and literary spheres. All of the chapters share an interest in the close-reading of texts as the basis for drawing broader conclusions about these fascinating authors, their poetry, and their worlds.

Ovid's Tragic Heroines

Ovid's Tragic Heroines
Author: Jessica A. Westerhold
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2023-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501770365

Ovid's Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovid's incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poet's persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female "nature," and are generically marked as "tragic." Ovid's masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities. Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovid's poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovid's reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovid's process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry. Ovid's Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovid's poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovid's Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poem's genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.

Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity

Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity
Author: Ian Fielding
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-10-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107178436

This book highlights Ovid's influence on important later Latin authors writing from the fourth to the sixth centuries in Europe and Africa.

Ovid: Amores Book 3

Ovid: Amores Book 3
Author: P. J. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2024-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198871309

Augustan love elegy represents one of the most important and most distinctive Roman contributions to European and world literature. This volume presents the first detailed commentary in any language on Ovid's Amores Book 3, the last collection of love poems composed in the Augustan age. Aimed at both students and scholars, the commentary has been written to be as accessible to as many readers as possible, with all quotations from ancient Greek and modern languages being translated. It includes an Introduction for the general reader which pays particular attention not only to the book's poetic design and the distinctive features of Ovid's style, but the relationship of the whole three-book collection to earlier love elegy and its handling of political and social questions. It offers an edition of the text of Book 3 based on printed editions together with a translation designed to clarify the surface meaning of the Latin. P. J. Davis's commentary focuses on topics including Ovid's engagement with the works of earlier poets, his use of rhetoric and wit, his employment of verbal and metrical patterns, textual difficulties, and, of course, the elucidation of linguistic problems. Amores Book 3 takes love elegy in new directions giving us, for example, a dream-vision poem, a dutiful husband's account of a religious pilgrimage, and the speech of a pickup artist trying to seduce a girl at the races. Perhaps its most striking feature is its shift away from obsession with a single mistress to reflection on the poet's place in the tradition of Latin love poetry, with poems explicitly devoted to issues raised by Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius.

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire
Author: Kirk Freudenburg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2005-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521803595

Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed by the Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely 'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imagination as the one genre that could address the problems of city life from the perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion an international team of scholars provides a stimulating introduction to Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, placing them within the contexts of Greco-Roman literary and political history. Besides addressing basic questions of authors, content, and form, the volume looks to the question of what satire 'does' within the world of Greco-Roman social exchanges, and goes on to treat the genre's further development, reception, and translation in Elizabethan England and beyond. Included are studies of the prosimetric, 'Menippean' satires that would become the models of Rabelais, Erasmus, More, and (narrative satire's crowning jewel) Swift.