Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry – serie

What is distinctive about Greek lyric poetry? How should we conceptualize it in relation to broader categories such as literature / song / music / rhetoric / history? What critical tools might we use to analyse it? How do we, should we, can we relate to its intensities of expression, its modes of address, its uses of myth and imagery, its attitudes to materiality, its sense of its own time, and its contextualizations? These are questions that this discussion seeks to investigate, exploring and analysing a range of influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.

This contribution by Gesine Manuwald provides an introduction to all varieties of ‘Roman comedy’, including primarily fabula palliata (‘New Comedy’, as represented by Plautus and Terence) as well as fabula togata, fabula Atellana, mimus and pantomimus. It examines the major developments in the establishment of these dramatic genres, their main characteristics, the performance contexts for them in Republican Rome, and their reception. The presentation of the key facts is accompanied by a description of the influential turns and recent trends in scholarship on Roman comedy. The essay is designed for scholars, teachers and (graduate) students who have some familiarity with Roman literature and are looking for (further) orientation in the area of Roman comedy.

In this volume, Francesca Martelli outlines some of the main contours of recent, current and future research on Ovid. Her study looks back to the rehabilitation of Ovid's oeuvre in the 1980s, and considers the post-modern aesthetic prerogatives and post-structuralist theoretical concerns that drove the critical recuperation of his poetry throughout that decade and in the decades that followed. But it also looks forward, by considering how the themes of this poet's oeuvre answer to a variety of new materialist concerns that are now gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences. It highlights the ecopoetic sensibility of the Metamorphoses, for example, and unpacks the environmental narratives that this poem yields when read in dialogue with the discourses of critical posthumanism. And it closes by considering the hauntological aesthetics of Ovid's exile poetry as a comment on the effects of the principate on time, space, media, and art.

How do you insert yourself into an artistic canon? How do you establish yourself as a worthy successor to your predecessors while making your own mark on a genre? How do you police a genre’s boundaries to keep out the unwanted? With particular attention to authorial and national identity, artistic self-definition, and literary reception, this volume shows how four ancient Latin poets—Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal—asked and answered these questions between the second century BCE and the second century CE as they invented and reinvented the genre of Roman verse Satire.

How can the ancient relationship between Homer and the Epic Cycle be recovered? Using findings from the most significant research in the field, Andrew Porter questions many ancient and modern assumptions and offers alternative perspectives better aligned with ancient epic performance realities and modern epic studies. Porter’s volume addresses a number of related issues: the misrepresentation of Cyclic (and Homeric) epic by Aristotle and his inheritors; the role of the epic singer, patron/collector, and scribe/poet in the formation of memorialized songs; the relevance of shared patterns and devices and of other traditional connections between ancient epics; and the distinct fates of Homeric and Cyclic epic. Homer and the Epic Cycle: Recovering the Oral Traditional Relationship provides new answers to an age-old problem.

In this volume, Robin J. Greene traces the development of Greek elegy and lyric in the hands of Hellenistic and Roman-era poets, from literary superstars such as Callimachus and Theocritus to more obscure, often anonymous authors. Designed as a guide for advanced students and scholars working in adjacent fields, this volume introduces and explores the diverse body of surviving later Greek elegy and lyric, contextualizes it within Hellenistic and Roman culture and politics, and surveys contemporary critical interpretations, methodological approaches, and avenues for future study.

This analysis explores select aspects of the extant fragmentary record of early Roman poetry from its earliest accessible moments through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its traceable existence. Key questions include how ancient readers made sense of the record as then available to them and how the limitations of their accounts, assumptions, and working methods continue to define the contours of our understanding today. Both using and challenging the standard conceptual frameworks operative in the ancient world, the discussion details what we think we know of the best documented forms, practitioners, contexts, and reception of Roman drama (excluding comedy), epic, and satire in their early instantiations, with occasional glances at the further generic experimentation that accompanied the genesis of literary practice at Rome.

Lucretius’ De rerum natura, written around 55 BCE, ranks among the most influential texts in Roman literature. The poet’s vision of a world made of atoms, his mockery of the fear of death and the gods, and fervent advocacy of the mortality of the soul over many centuries incensed his critics on one hand, and on the other earned him a devoted following. This volume provides an introduction to the oldest completely preserved Latin didactic poem and to the most important research questions concerned with the text.

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).

Roman imperial epic is enjoying a moment in the sun in the twenty-first century, as Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus have all been the subject of a remarkable increase in scholarly attention and appreciation. Lucan and Flavian epic characterizes and historicizes that moment, showing how the qualities of the poems and the histories of their receptions have brought about the kind of analysis and attention they are now receiving. Serving both experienced scholars of the poems and students interested in them for the first time, this book offers a new perspective on current and future directions in scholarship.