Reading Poetry, Writing Genre

Silvio Bär is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests encompass Greek epic and lyric poetry, Attic tragedy, the Second Sophistic, mythography, rhetoric, intertextuality, narratology, and the reception of ancient themes in English literature and popular culture.Emily Hauser is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests include ancient women writers, gender and authorship in the classical world, and the reception of classical women by contemporary female authors. She has published on women writers in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the reception of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.

[This book] aims ‘to map the history and development of English poetry and the literary criticism connected to it as a story of genre discourse in dialogue with classical scholarship’ (p. 1). For certain contributors … questions of genre are of primary concern, while for others … genre appears in the midst of broader studies in reception. This is a positive, in the sense that those looking for work on classical reception (and translation) in English literature will find as much here as the reader interested specifically in the history of genre.

• Introduction: Silvio Bär (University of Oslo) and Emily Hauser (Harvard University)1: Amanda J. Gerber (Eastern New Mexico University) - Classical Pieces: Fragmenting Genres in Medieval England2: Emma Buckley (University of St. Andrews) - “Poetry is a Speaking Picture”: Framing a Poetics of Tragedy in Late Elizabethan England3: Ariane Schwartz (Harvard University/I Tatti Renaissance Library) - A Revolutionary Vergil: James Harrington, Poetry, and Political Performance4: Caroline Stark (Howard University, Washington) - The Devouring Maw: Complexities of Classical Genre in Milton’s Paradise Lost5: Juan Christian Pellicer (University of Oslo) - Georgic as Genre: The Scholarly Reception of Vergil in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain6: Lilah Grace Canevaro (University of Edinburgh) - Rhyme and Reason: The Homeric Translations of Dryden, Pope, and Morris7: Isobel Hurst (Goldsmiths, University of London) - From Epic to Monologue: Tennyson and Homer8: Silvio Bär (University of Oslo) - The Elizabethan Epyllion: From Constructed Classical Genre to Twentieth-Century Genre Propre9: Emily Hauser (Harvard University) - “Homer Undone”: Homeric Scholarship and the Invention of Female Epic10: Fiona Cox (University of Exeter) - Generic “Transgressions” and the Personal VoiceGeneral IndexIndex of Passages Cited