Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination

Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination PDF Author: William Fitzgerald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779692
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Examines slavery in Roman culture through analysis of Roman literature; topics covered include punishment, fantasy, and the use of slaves as intermediaries between free persons.

Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination

Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination PDF Author: William Fitzgerald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779692
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Examines slavery in Roman culture through analysis of Roman literature; topics covered include punishment, fantasy, and the use of slaves as intermediaries between free persons.

Arbitrary Rule

Arbitrary Rule PDF Author: Mary Nyquist
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601553X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

The Freedman in the Roman World

The Freedman in the Roman World PDF Author: Henrik Mouritsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Freedmen occupied a complex and often problematic place in Roman society between slaves on the one hand and freeborn citizens on the other. Playing an extremely important role in the economic life of the Roman world, they were also a key instrument for replenishing and even increasing the size of the citizen body. This book presents an original synthesis, for the first time covering both Republic and Empire in a single volume. While providing up-to-date discussions of most significant aspects of the phenomenon, the book also offers a new understanding of the practice of manumission, its role in the organisation of slave labour and the Roman economy, as well as the deep-seated ideological concerns to which it gave rise. It locates the freedman in a broader social and economic context, explaining the remarkable popularity of manumission in the Roman world.

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature PDF Author: Ezra Tawil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107048761
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book brings together leading scholars to examine slavery in American literature from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy

Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy PDF Author: Kathleen McCarthy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400824702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
What pleasures did Plautus' heroic tricksters provide their original audience? How should we understand the compelling mix of rebellion and social conservatism that Plautus offers? Through a close reading of four plays representing the full range of his work (Menaechmi, Casina, Persa, and Captivi), Kathleen McCarthy develops an innovative model of Plautine comedy and its social effects. She concentrates on how the plays are shaped by the interaction of two comic modes: the socially conservative mode of naturalism and the potentially subversive mode of farce. It is precisely this balance of the naturalistic and the farcical that allows everyone in the audience--especially those well placed in the social hierarchy--to identify both with and against the rebel, to feel both the thrill of being a clever underdog and the complacency of being a securely ensconced authority figure. Basing her interpretation on the workings of farce and naturalism in Plautine comedy, McCarthy finds a way to understand the plays' patchwork literary style as well as their protean social effects. Beyond this, she raises important questions about popular literature and performance not only on ancient Roman stages but in cultures far from Plautus' Rome. How and why do people identify with the fictional figures of social subordinates? How do stock characters, happy endings, and other conventions operate? How does comedy simultaneously upset and uphold social hierarchies? Scholars interested in Plautine theater will be rewarded by the detailed analyses of the plays, while those more broadly interested in social and cultural history will find much that is useful in McCarthy's new way of grasping the elusive ideological effects of comedy.

Associationism and the Literary Imagination

Associationism and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Cairns Craig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Provides an account of the philosophical and psychological theories in the British empiricist tradition that provoked some of the most radical changes in literary form between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.

Slave Theater in the Roman Republic

Slave Theater in the Roman Republic PDF Author: Amy Richlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108216439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Roman comedy evolved early in the war-torn 200s BCE. Troupes of lower-class and slave actors traveled through a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved; together, the actors made comedy to address mixed-class, hybrid, multilingual audiences. Surveying the whole of the Plautine corpus, where slaves are central figures, and the extant fragments of early comedy, this book is grounded in the history of slavery and integrates theories of resistant speech, humor, and performance. Part I shows how actors joked about what people feared - natal alienation, beatings, sexual abuse, hard labor, hunger, poverty - and how street-theater forms confronted debt, violence, and war loss. Part II catalogues the onstage expression of what people desired: revenge, honor, free will, legal personhood, family, marriage, sex, food, free speech; a way home, through memory; and manumission, or escape - all complicated by the actors' maleness. Comedy starts with anger.

A Week in the Life of a Slave

A Week in the Life of a Slave PDF Author: John Byron
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830870784
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Paul's epistle to Philemon is one of the shortest books in the entire Bible, and it certainly leaves plenty to the imagination. From the pen of an accomplished New Testament scholar, this vivid historical fiction account follows the slave Onesimus, fleshing out the lived context of first-century Ephesus and providing a social and theological critique of slavery in the Roman Empire.

Inconsistency in Roman Epic

Inconsistency in Roman Epic PDF Author: James J. O'Hara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113946132X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
How should we react as readers and as critics when two passages in a literary work contradict one another? Classicists once assumed that all inconsistencies in ancient texts needed to be amended, explained away, or lamented. Building on recent work on both Greek and Roman authors, this book explores the possibility of interpreting inconsistencies in Roman epic. After a chapter surveying Greek background material including Homer, tragedy, Plato and the Alexandrians, five chapters argue that comparative study of the literary use of inconsistencies can shed light on major problems in Catullus' Peleus and Thetis, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Not all inconsistencies can or should be interpreted thematically, but numerous details in these poems, and some ancient and modern theorists, suggest that we can be better readers if we consider how inconsistencies may be functioning in Greek and Roman texts.

Plautus and Roman Slavery

Plautus and Roman Slavery PDF Author: Roberta Stewart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405196289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book studies a crucial phase in the history of Roman slavery, beginning with the transition to chattel slavery in the third century bce and ending with antiquity’s first large-scale slave rebellion in the 130s bce. Slavery is a relationship of power, and to study slavery – and not simply masters or slaves – we need to see the interactions of individuals who speak to each other, a rare kind of evidence from the ancient world. Plautus’ comedies could be our most reliable source for reconstructing the lives of slaves in ancient Rome. By reading literature alongside the historical record, we can conjure a thickly contextualized picture of slavery in the late third and early second centuries bce, the earliest period for which we have such evidence. The book discusses how slaves were captured and sold; their treatment by the master and the community; the growth of the conception of the slave as “other than human,” and as chattel; and the problem of freedom for both slaves and society.