Hunter H. Gardner – författare

Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy examines how and why time appears to affect men and women differently in Latin love elegy. Considering the genre''s brief flowering during the Augustan Principate, it aims to situate the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu. The volume argues that the imperatives of the new regime, which encouraged a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government,placed temporal pressures on the elite male that shaped the amator''s (poet-lover''s) resistance to enter a course of civil service and prompted his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved.In the second part of the volume Gardner focuses on the divergent temporal experiences of the amator and his beloved courtesan-puella (girl) through the lens of ''women''s time'' (le temps des femmes) and the chora, as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva''s model of feminine subjectivity, defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity, allows us to understand how the beloved''s marginalization from the realm of historical time provesadvantageous to her amator, wishing to defer his entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of ''women''s time'' and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how ''women''s time'' ultimately thwarts the amator''s often promised generic evolution.

Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery.Theorists such as Susan Sontag and René Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in anenvironment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola''s paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and MargaretAtwood''s Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.

Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery.Theorists such as Susan Sontag and René Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in anenvironment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola''s paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and MargaretAtwood''s Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.

Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14 CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Theorists such as Susan Sontag and René Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in an environment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola's paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.

Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy examines how and why time appears to affect men and women differently in Latin love elegy. Considering the genre's brief flowering during the Augustan Principate, it aims to situate the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu. The volume argues that the imperatives of the new regime, which encouraged a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government, placed temporal pressures on the elite male that shaped the amator's (poet-lover's) resistance to enter a course of civil service and prompted his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved.In the second part of the volume Gardner focuses on the divergent temporal experiences of the amator and his beloved courtesan-puella (girl) through the lens of 'women's time' (le temps des femmes) and the chora, as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's model of feminine subjectivity, defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity, allows us to understand how the beloved's marginalization from the realm of historical time proves advantageous to her amator, wishing to defer his entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of 'women's time' and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how 'women's time' ultimately thwarts the amator's often promised generic evolution.

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).