Gian Biagio Conte - Böcker

This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid.. It forms the sequel to two widely influential earlier books on Virgil by the same author and translates and adds to a collection of papers published in Italian in 2002. Its central concern is the way in which Virgil reworks earlier poetry (especially that of Homer) at the most detailed level to produce very broad literary and emotional effects. Gian Biaggio Conte explores a central issue in Virgilian studies, that of how the Aeneid manages to create a new and effective mode of epic in a period when the genre appears to be debased or exhausted.

"The Satyricon of Petronius", a comic novel written in the first century A.D., is famous today primarily for its amazing banquet tale, "Trimalchio's Feast." But this episode is only one part of the larger picture of life during Nero's rule presented in the work. In this accessible discussion of Petronius' masterful use of parody, Gian Biagio Conte offers an interpretation of the "Satyricon" as a whole. He combines the scholarly precision of close reading with a significant, original theoretical model. At the heart of his interpretation, Conte reveals the technique of the 'hidden author' that Petronius employs at the expense of his characters, in particular the teller of the story, "Enclopius". By remaining hidden outside the narrative, Petronius invites the reader to smile at the folies de grandeur that occur in a culture of scholars and declaimers. Yet as Conte shows, behind the parody and inexhaustible humor of the "Satyricon" lies an unexpectedly serious lament. For those familiar with the "Satyricon", as well as for new readers, Conte's book will be a reliable, enjoyable guide to the wonders the "Satyricon" contains.

This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades. From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte.

This is an original collection of exemplary emendations made by ancient and modern scholars. Single examples are analysed in order to extract a method of emendation. The author reviews some attractive interventions which offer a model of textual criticism: a kind of ideal museum of critical intelligence applied to corruptions or cryptocorruptions which have damaged some Greek and Latin literary texts. All Greek and Latin passages included are literally translated and commented step by step. Advanced students and scholars are offered an orderly sequence of ‘cruces’ healed by great philologists so that a teaching route is granted.

In this book, conceived as a sort of Prolegomena to his two Teubner editions, Conte gives account of his choices in editing his Virgilian text. Engaging in a passionate debate with his predecessors and critics, he guides the reader in a fascinating journey in the history of transmission and interpretation of Georgics and Aeneid and shows how lively textual criticism can be.

In the first part of this volume on the literary technique of imitation, the author analyses Virgil's working over the text of Homer which paradoxically represents a true act of artistic originality. In the second chapter, the author reconstructs the presuppositions of a method and explores at the same time its limitations.