Donncha O'Rourke – författare

This collection addresses how models from ancient Greece and Rome have permeated Irish political discourse in the century since 1916. The 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish nationalists rose up against British imperial forces, became almost instantly mythologized in Irish political memory as a turning point in the nation's history that paved the way for Irish independence. Its centenary has provided a natural point for reflection on Irish politics, and this volume highlights an unexplored element in Irish political discourse, namely its frequent reliance on, reference to, and tensions with classical Greek and Roman models. Topics covered include the reception and rejection of classical culture in Ireland; the politics of Irish language engagement with Greek and Roman models; the intersection of Irish literature with scholarship in Classics and Celtic Studies; the use of classical referents to articulate political inequalities across gender, sexual, and class hierarchies; meditations on the Northern Irish conflict through classical literature; and the political implications of neoclassical material culture in Irish society. As the only country colonized by Britain with a pre-existing indigenous heritage of expertise in classical languages and literature, postcolonial Ireland represents a unique case in the field of classical reception. This book opens a window on a rich and varied dialogue between significant figures in Irish cultural history and the Greek and Roman sources that have inspired them, a dialogue that is firmly rooted in Ireland's historical past and continues to be ever-evolving.

Both in antiquity and ever since the Renaissance Lucretius' De Rerum Natura has been admired - and condemned - for its startling poetry, its evangelical faith in materialist causation, and its seductive advocacy of the Epicurean good life. Approaches to Lucretius assembles an international team of classicists and philosophers to take stock of a range of critical approaches to which this influential poem has given rise and which in turn have shaped its interpretation, including textual criticism, the text's strategies for engaging the reader with its author and his message, the 'atomology' that posits a correlation of the letters of the poem with the atoms of the universe, the literary and philosophical intertexts that mediate the poem, and the political and ideological questions that it raises. Thirteen essays take up a variety of positions within these traditions of interpretation, innovating within them and advancing beyond them in new directions.

Both in antiquity and ever since the Renaissance Lucretius' De Rerum Natura has been admired - and condemned - for its startling poetry, its evangelical faith in materialist causation, and its seductive advocacy of the Epicurean good life. Approaches to Lucretius assembles an international team of classicists and philosophers to take stock of a range of critical approaches to which this influential poem has given rise and which in turn have shaped its interpretation, including textual criticism, the text's strategies for engaging the reader with its author and his message, the 'atomology' that posits a correlation of the letters of the poem with the atoms of the universe, the literary and philosophical intertexts that mediate the poem, and the political and ideological questions that it raises. Thirteen essays take up a variety of positions within these traditions of interpretation, innovating within them and advancing beyond them in new directions.

Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility is an in-depth study of Propertius' final collection of elegies as the earliest concerted response to the poetic career of Virgil in its totality. Seven chapters show how Propertius' fourth book, published three or more years after Virgil's death, enacts the canonical status of Rome's foremost poet through an intimate conversation across a number of themes, from socio-political and historical questions centring on, for example, Rome's evolution from rustic past to 'golden age' superpower, gender and patriarchy, and warfare both international and internecine, to literary questions concerning the generic identity of elegy and epic, the appropriation of Callimachus, and the architecture of poetry books. Propertius' totalizing reading reveals an elegiac Virgil as much as it does an epicizing Propertius, with a sometimes obsessive attention to detail that enlarges familiar paradigms of allusion and intertextuality and has implications for how literary and textual criticism are practised.