Virgil on the Nature of Things

Virgil on the Nature of Things PDF Author: Monica R. Gale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139428470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The Georgics has for many years been a source of fierce controversy among scholars of Latin literature. Is the work optimistic or pessimistic, pro- or anti-Augustan? Should we read it as a eulogy or a bitter critique of Rome and her imperial ambitions? This book suggests that the ambiguity of the poem is the product of a complex and thorough-going engagement with earlier writers in the didactic tradition: Hesiod, Aratus and - above all - Lucretius. Drawing on both traditional, philological approaches to allusion, and modern theories of intertextuality, it shows how the world-views of the earlier poets are subjected to scrutiny and brought into conflict with each other. Detailed consideration of verbal parallels and of Lucretian themes, imagery and structural patterns in the Georgics forms the basis for a reading of Virgil's poem as an extended meditation on the relations between the individual and society, the gods and the natural environment.

Virgil on the Nature of Things

Virgil on the Nature of Things PDF Author: Monica R. Gale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139428470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Georgics has for many years been a source of fierce controversy among scholars of Latin literature. Is the work optimistic or pessimistic, pro- or anti-Augustan? Should we read it as a eulogy or a bitter critique of Rome and her imperial ambitions? This book suggests that the ambiguity of the poem is the product of a complex and thorough-going engagement with earlier writers in the didactic tradition: Hesiod, Aratus and - above all - Lucretius. Drawing on both traditional, philological approaches to allusion, and modern theories of intertextuality, it shows how the world-views of the earlier poets are subjected to scrutiny and brought into conflict with each other. Detailed consideration of verbal parallels and of Lucretian themes, imagery and structural patterns in the Georgics forms the basis for a reading of Virgil's poem as an extended meditation on the relations between the individual and society, the gods and the natural environment.

Virgil & Lucretius

Virgil & Lucretius PDF Author: Virgil
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
This is a collection of poetry by two of the most famous Roman poets. There are twelve poems by Virgil and ten poems by Lucretius. They have been translated by William Stebbing, a classical scholar from Oxford.

Virgil's Experience

Virgil's Experience PDF Author: Richard Jenkyns
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 019158455X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 729

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Book Description
This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity. It is exact and patient in its probing for nuance and detail, but also bold, wide, and original in its scope. It combines the study of Virgil with the study of attitudes to nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

Creative Imitation and Latin Literature

Creative Imitation and Latin Literature PDF Author: David West
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The contributors analyse passages from various authors to demonstrate how Latin authors created new works of art by imitating earlier literature.

The Lucretian Renaissance

The Lucretian Renaissance PDF Author: Gerard Passannante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226648494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe. By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters—a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering. From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

Virgil's Georgics

Virgil's Georgics PDF Author: Gary B. Miles
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520327748
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics

Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics PDF Author: Nicholas Freer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350070521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Virgil's Georgics, the most neglected of the poet's three major works, is brought to life and infused with fresh meanings in this dynamic collection of new readings. The Georgics is shown to be a rich field of inherited and varied literary forms, actively inviting a wide range of interpretations as well as deep reflection on its place within the tradition of didactic poetry. The essays contained in this volume – contributed by scholars from Australia, Europe and North America – offer new approaches and interpretive methods that greatly enhance our understanding of Virgil's poem. In the process, they unearth an array of literary and philosophical sources which exerted a rich influence on the Georgics but whose impact has hitherto been underestimated in scholarship. A second goal of the volume is to examine how the Georgics – with its profound meditations on humankind, nature, and the socio-political world of its creation – has been (re)interpreted and appropriated by readers and critics from antiquity to the modern era. The volume opens up a number of exciting new research avenues for the study of the reception of the Georgics by highlighting the myriad ways in which the poem has been understood by ancient readers, early modern poets, explorers of the 'New World', and female translators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Lucretian Receptions

Lucretian Receptions PDF Author: Philip Hardie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521760416
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Lucretius' 'De rerum natura', one of the greatest Latin poems, worked a powerful fascination on Virgil and Horace, and continued to be an important model for later poets in antiquity and after, including Milton. This innovative set of studies on the reception of Lucretius is organized round three major themes: history and time, the sublime, and knowledge. The 'De rerum natura' was foundational for Augustan poets' dealings with history and time in the new age of the principate. It is also a major document in the history of the sublime; Virgil and Horace engage with the Lucretian sublime in ways that exercised a major influence on the sublime in later antique and Renaissance literature. The 'De rerum natura' presents a confident account of the ultimate truths of the universe; later didactic and epic poets respond with varying degrees of certainty or uncertainty to the challenge of Lucretius' Epicurean gospel.

Vergil's Georgics

Vergil's Georgics PDF Author: Katharina Volk
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191562297
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This volume, together with its companion on the Eclogues and the previously published volume on the Aeneid, completes the coverage of Vergil's poetry in Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. It collects ten classic papers on the Georgics written between 1970 and 1999 by leading scholars from several different countries. The contributions are representative of recent developments in Vergilian scholarship, with some discussing general issues raised by the work and others treating important individual poems and passages. The editor's Introduction places the essays in their context. A conspectus of contemporary Georgics criticism, the book will be helpful to students who are encountering the poems for the first time - all Latin has been translated - and will also serve as a reference work for more seasoned scholars.

The Criticism of Didactic Poetry

The Criticism of Didactic Poetry PDF Author: Alexander Dalzell
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802008224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Dalzell presents three of the major didactic poems in the classical canon: the De rerum natura of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Ars amatoria of Ovid, considering what tools are available for their understanding.