Stephen Hinds – författare

The Latin language is popularly imagined in a number of specific ways: as a masculine language, an imperial language, a classical language, a dead language. This book considers the sources of these metaphors and analyses their effect on how Latin literature is read. It argues that these metaphors have become idées fixes not only in the popular imagination but in the formation of Latin studies as a professional discipline. By reading with and more commonly against these metaphors, the book offers a different view of Latin as a language and as a vehicle for cultural practice. The argument ranges over a variety of texts in Latin and texts about Latin produced by many different sorts of writers from antiquity to the twentieth century.

Ovid, a poet unashamedly in love in poetry, including his own, has enjoyed a recent renaissance in popularity. Yet there is still a certain tendency amongst critics to withhold from his writing the close, word-by-word, engagement which is its due. The primary aim of The Metamorphosis of Persephone is to celebrate this poet's detailed verbal art. Ovid twice treated the myth of Persephone. Dr Hinds' work is a close reading of the account in Metamorphoses 5. The book is at once a literary historical enquiry into the double transformation of the rape of Persephone, and a critical exploration of the self-conscious delight in language and in writing manifested in and between these twin Ovidian narratives. This attractively written and subtly nuanced literary study, which offers many quiet challenges to established modes of reading Latin narrative poetry, will be of interest both to scholars of Latin and to students of narrative in other languages.

Ovid, a poet unashamedly in love in poetry, including his own, has enjoyed a recent renaissance in popularity. Yet there is still a certain tendency amongst critics to withhold from his writing the close, word-by-word, engagement which is its due. The primary aim of The Metamorphosis of Persephone is to celebrate this poet's detailed verbal art. Ovid twice treated the myth of Persephone. Dr Hinds' work is a close reading of the account in Metamorphoses 5. The book is at once a literary historical enquiry into the double transformation of the rape of Persephone, and a critical exploration of the self-conscious delight in language and in writing manifested in and between these twin Ovidian narratives. This attractively written and subtly nuanced literary study, which offers many quiet challenges to established modes of reading Latin narrative poetry, will be of interest both to scholars of Latin and to students of narrative in other languages.

This short book is a study of the epic tradition of the early Roman empire and specifically of the epic poems of Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus. It explores the use they made of Virgil's Aeneid, an epic interpreted not just as a monument to the heroic construction of the principate, but also as a problematical text that challenged succeeding epic poets to a reworking of the issues that it dramatised: the possibility of establishing a lasting age of peace, the relation between power and the sacred, the difficulties of distinguishing between good and its evil parodies, anxiety about imperial and poetic succession. The author draws on modern critical and theoretical approaches to argue for the vitality and interest of works which have all too often been relegated to a second division of literary history.

This book applies some of the procedures of modern critical theory (in particular reception-theory, deconstruction, theories of dialogue and the hermeneutics associated with the German philosopher Gadamer) to the interpretation of Latin poetry. Charles Martindale argues that we neither can nor should attempt to return to an 'original' meaning for ancient poems, free from later accretions and the processes of appropriation; more traditional approaches to literary enquiry conceal a metaphysics which has been put in question by various anti-foundationalist accounts of the nature of meaning and the relationship between language and what it describes. From this perspective the author examines different readings of the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Lucan, in order to suggest alternative ways in which those texts might more profitably be read. Finally he focuses on a key term for such study 'translation' and examines the epistemological questions it raises and seeks to circumvent.

The study of the deliberate allusion by one author to the words of a previous author has long been central to Latin philology. However, literary Romanists have been diffident about situating such work within the more spacious inquiries into intertextuality now current. This 1998 book represents an attempt to find (or recover) some space for the study of allusion - as a project of continuing vitality - within an excitingly enlarged universe of intertexts. It combines traditional classical approaches with modern literary-theoretical ways of thinking, and offers attentive close readings, innovative perspectives on literary history, and theoretical sophistication of argument. Like other volumes in the series it is among the most broadly conceived short books on Roman literature to be published in recent years.

The study of the deliberate allusion by one author to the words of a previous author has long been central to Latin philology. However, literary Romanists have been diffident about situating such work within the more spacious inquiries into intertextuality now current. This 1998 book represents an attempt to find (or recover) some space for the study of allusion - as a project of continuing vitality - within an excitingly enlarged universe of intertexts. It combines traditional classical approaches with modern literary-theoretical ways of thinking, and offers attentive close readings, innovative perspectives on literary history, and theoretical sophistication of argument. Like other volumes in the series it is among the most broadly conceived short books on Roman literature to be published in recent years.

This book explores the presence of slaves and slavery in Roman literature and asks particularly what the free imagination made of the experience of living with slaves, beings who both were and were not fellow humans. As a shadow humanity, slaves furnished the free with other selves and imaginative alibis as well as mediators between and substitutes for their peers. As presences that witnessed their owners' most unguarded moments they possessed a knowledge that was the object of both curiosity and anxiety. The book discusses not only the ideological relations of Roman literature to the institution of slavery, but also the ways in which slavery provided a metaphor for a range of other relationships and experiences, and in particular for literature itself. It is arranged thematically and covers a broad chronological and generic field.

Latin poetry is defined by its relationships with poetry in other languages. It was originally constituted by its relation to Greek, and in later times has been constituted by its relation to the European vernaculars. In this bold and innovative book, distinguished Latinist Stephen Hinds explores these relationships through a series of vignettes. These explore ancient conversations between Latin and Greek verse texts, followed by modern (especially early modern) conversations between Latin and European vernacular verse texts, reflecting the linked stories of reception that make up the so-called 'classical tradition': conversations across language, across period, and sometimes both at the same time. The book's range is expansive, ranging from Homer through Virgil and the Augustans to late antiquity, the Renaissance, Romanticism and on to Seamus Heaney. There is an especial focus on the parallel vernacular and Latin output of Milton and Marvell in England and Du Bellay in France.