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Author: Jessica Blum-Sorensen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299344606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
By the time the Roman poet Valerius Flaccus wrote in the first century CE, the tale of Jason and his famous ship the Argo had been retold so often it was a byword for poetic banality. Why, then, did Valerius construct his epic Argonautica? In this innovative analysis, Jessica Blum-Sorensen argues that it was precisely the myth's overplayed nature that appealed to Valerius, operating in and responding to a period of social and political upheaval. Seeking to comment obliquely on Roman reliance on mythic exempla to guide action and expected outcomes, there was no better vessel for his social and political message than the familiar Argo. Focusing especially on Hercules, Blum-Sorensen explores how Valerius' characters--and, by extension, their Roman audience--misinterpret exemplars of past achievement, or apply them to sad effect in changed circumstances. By reading such models as normative guides to epic triumph, Valerius' Argonauts find themselves enacting tragic outcomes: effectively, the characters impose their nostalgic longing for epic triumph on the events before them, even as Valerius and his audience anticipate the tragedy awaiting his heroes. Valerius thus questions Rome's reliance on the past as a guide to the present, allowing for doubt about the empire's success under the new Flavian regime. It is the literary tradition's exchange between triumphant epic and tragedy that makes the Argo's voyage a perfect vehicle for Valerius' exploration: the tensions between genres both raise and prohibit resolution of anxieties about how the new age--mythological or real--will turn out.
Author: Jessica Blum-Sorensen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299344606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book Here
Book Description
By the time the Roman poet Valerius Flaccus wrote in the first century CE, the tale of Jason and his famous ship the Argo had been retold so often it was a byword for poetic banality. Why, then, did Valerius construct his epic Argonautica? In this innovative analysis, Jessica Blum-Sorensen argues that it was precisely the myth's overplayed nature that appealed to Valerius, operating in and responding to a period of social and political upheaval. Seeking to comment obliquely on Roman reliance on mythic exempla to guide action and expected outcomes, there was no better vessel for his social and political message than the familiar Argo. Focusing especially on Hercules, Blum-Sorensen explores how Valerius' characters--and, by extension, their Roman audience--misinterpret exemplars of past achievement, or apply them to sad effect in changed circumstances. By reading such models as normative guides to epic triumph, Valerius' Argonauts find themselves enacting tragic outcomes: effectively, the characters impose their nostalgic longing for epic triumph on the events before them, even as Valerius and his audience anticipate the tragedy awaiting his heroes. Valerius thus questions Rome's reliance on the past as a guide to the present, allowing for doubt about the empire's success under the new Flavian regime. It is the literary tradition's exchange between triumphant epic and tragedy that makes the Argo's voyage a perfect vehicle for Valerius' exploration: the tensions between genres both raise and prohibit resolution of anxieties about how the new age--mythological or real--will turn out.
Author: Stephen Sicari
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791406991
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
This book is both an introductory overview of The Cantos and a detailed analysis advancing the knowledge of even the most sophisticated specialist. Sicari's analysis gives a clear orientation to the often bewildering but ultimately rewarding world of this difficult epic poem and shows that beneath the surface of the poem is the classical figure of the epic wanderer whose journey provides the "plot" of the poem. Non-specialists will appreciate Sicari's synthesis of a wide range of material. Sicari explores how Dante and the epic tradition informs The Cantos; those interested in the epic should find Sicari's study an important contribution to the field. Those studying modernism in general will see in Sicari's definition of the modern epic useful ways to study the other great achievements of high modernism, especially those of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce. Those interested in the relation between literature and politics will find this book especially informative, for Sicari is one of the few critics on Pound who does not ignore Pound's politics, or simply castigate him for the unfortunate views he adopts and advocates. The analysis of Pound's fascism is a sub-theme that sheds new light on how politics enters a great modernist poem and affects its shape and intention.
Author: Line Henriksen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042021497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
"This comparative study investigates the epic lineage that can be traced back from Derek Walcott's Omeros and Ezra Pound's Cantos through Dante's Divina Commedia to the epic poems of Virgil and Homer, and identifies and discusses in detail a number of recurrent key topoi. A fresh definition of the concept of genre is worked out and presented, based on readings of Homer. The study reads Pound's and Walcott's poetics in the light of Roman Jakobson's notions of metonymy and metaphor, placing their long poems at the respective opposite ends of their language poles." "Although there has already been an intermittent critical focus on the 'classical' (and 'Dantean') antecedents of Walcott's poetry, the present study is the first to bring together the whole range of epic intertextualities underlying Omeros, and the first to read this Caribbean masterpiece in the context of Pound's achievement." --Book Jacket.
Author: Ken Follett
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698160576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1122
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Book Description
Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.
Author: Anthony J. Boyle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134763247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Roman epic is both index and critique of the foundational culture of the western world. It is one of Europe's most persistent and determinant poetic modes. In this book distinguished Latinists examine the formation and evolution of Roman epic from its beginnings in the third century BC to the high Italian Renaissance. Featuring a variety of methodologies and approaches, it clarifies the literary importance and political and moral meaning of Roman epic.
Author: Michael Armstrong-Roche
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442691158
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
Miguel de Cervantes conceived his final work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1617), as a great prose epic that would accomplish for its age what Homer and Virgil had done for theirs. And yet, by the eighteenth century Don Quixote had eclipsed Persiles in the favour of readers and writers alike and the later novel is now virtually forgotten except by specialists. This study sets out to help restore Persiles to pride of place within Cervantes's corpus by reading it as the author's summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an original light on the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of its era. At the same time it seeks to illuminate how such a lofty and solemn ambition could coexist with Cervantes evident urge to delight. Grounded in the novel's multiple contexts - literature, history and politics, philosophy and theology - and in close reading of the text, Michael Armstrong-Roche aims to reshape our understanding of Persiles within the history of prose fiction and to take part in the ongoing conversation about the relationship between literary and non-literary cultural forms. Ultimately he reveals how Cervantes recast the prose epic, expanding it in new directions to accommodate the great epic themes - politics, love, and religion - to the most urgent concerns of his day.
Author: Michael O'Neill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521883067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1117
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Book Description
A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.
Author: Margaret Gurevich
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1496539540
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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Book Description
Chloe is beyond excited to be back in New York City after winning Teen Design Diva and can't wait to start her dream internship with famed designer, Stefan Meyers. But the rivalry and drama she thought she left behind in the competition is back when the other interns begin to question her abilities. Can Chloe prove to everyone, including herself, that she truly belongs?
Author: J. Alison Rosenblitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019107988X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
This volume is a major, ground-breaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify 20th-century Anglophone poets in the Classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. He specialised in the study of classical literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and his contemporaries saw him as a 'pagan' poet or a 'Juvenalian' satirist, with an Aristophanic sense of humour. In E.E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics, Alison Rosenblitt aims to recover for the contemporary reader this lost understanding of Cummings as a classicizing poet. The book also includes an edition of previously unpublished work by Cummings himself, unearthed from archival research. For the first time, the reader has access to the full scope of Cummings' translations from Horace, Homer, and Greek drama, as well as two short pieces of classically-related prose, a short 'Alcaics' and a previously unknown and classicizing parody of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This new work is exciting in its own right and essential to understanding Cummings' development as a poet.
Author: Claude Rawson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107034787
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
Explores the impact of the great satirist Jonathan Swift on other writers of the English Augustan tradition.
