Author: Elaine Fantham
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409275
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
This new edition broadens the scope of Fantham’s study of literary production and its reception in Rome. Scholars of ancient literature have often focused on the works and lives of major authors rather than on such questions as how these works were produced and who read them. In Roman Literary Culture, Elaine Fantham fills that void by examining the changing social and historical context of literary production in ancient Rome and its empire. Fantham’s first edition discussed the habits of Roman readers and developments in their means of access to literature, from booksellers and copyists to pirated publications and libraries. She examines the issues of patronage and the utility of literature and shows how the constraints of the physical object itself—the ancient "book"—influenced the practice of both reading and writing. She also explores the ways in which ancient criticism and critical attitudes reflected cultural assumptions of the time. In this second edition, Fantham expands the scope of her study. In the new first chapter, she examines the beginning of Roman literature—more than a century before the critical studies of Cicero and Varro. She discusses broader entertainment culture, which consisted of live performances of comedy and tragedy as well as oral presentations of the epic. A new final chapter looks at Pagan and Christian literature from the third to fifth centuries, showing how this period in Roman literature reflected its foundations in the literary culture of the late republic and Augustan age. This edition also includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.
Author: Alice König
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316999947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
This book explores new ways of analysing interactions between different linguistic, cultural, and religious communities across the Roman Empire from the reign of Nerva to the Severans (96–235 CE). Bringing together leading scholars in classics with experts in the history of Judaism, Christianity and the Near East, it looks beyond the Greco-Roman binary that has dominated many studies of the period, and moves beyond traditional approaches to intertextuality in its study of the circulation of knowledge across languages and cultures. Its sixteen chapters explore shared ideas about aspects of imperial experience - law, patronage, architecture, the army - as well as the movement of ideas about history, exempla, documents and marvels. As the second volume in the Literary Interactions series, it offers a new and expansive vision of cross-cultural interaction in the Roman world, shedding light on connections that have gone previously unnoticed among the subcultures of a vast and evolving Empire.
Author: William A. Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019972105X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.
Author: Denis Feeney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521559218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Recent reevaluations of Roman religion by ancient historians have stressed the vitality and creativity of the Romans' religious system throughout its long history of continual adaptation to new challenges. Capitalising on these insights, Denis Feeney argues that Roman literature was not an artificial or parasitic irrelevance in this context, but an important element of the dynamic religious culture, with its own status as another form of religious knowledge. Since Roman culture, both literary and religious, was so thoroughly Hellenised, the book also makes a case for a reconsideration of the traditional antitheses between Greek and Roman literature and religion, arguing against Hellenocentric prejudices and in favour of a more creative model of cultural interaction.
Author: Prudence J. Jones
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Reading Rivers is the first book in a new series: Roman Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Author Prudence Jones examines rivers as a literary phenomenon, particularly in the poetry of Vergil. The point of such an investigation is twofold: an examination of VergilOs poetry elucidates particularly clearly a point about rivers: that their inclusion functions almost as a literary device, and an examination of rivers makes a point about Vergil: that rivers are essential to understanding the trajectory of his works, in particular the structure of the Aeneid. This study depends primarily on the close analysis of the poetry of Vergil and of other relevant authors. In Part I Jones examines the Greco-Roman understanding of the river in its primary symbolic roles: cosmological, ritual and ethnographical. Part II analyzes the river as a literary device, with particular attention to the works of Vergil, and argues that descriptions of rivers in Roman poetry are, in many cases, a form of authorial comment on the progress or structure of a narrative. Jones gives scholars in the classics, and literary critics who focus specifically on Roman antiquity a special prism through which to view the works of Vergil as well as other significant authors. This book is also for those working in the fields of cultural studies, cultural geography, and ancient philosophy.
Author: Peter E. Knox
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195395166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648
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Book Description
Each selection begins with a short biographical and historical essay.
Author: Peter V. Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521386005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
The World of Rome is an introduction to the history and culture of Rome for students at university and at school as well as for anyone seriously interested in the ancient world. Drawing on the latest scholarship, it covers all aspects of the city - its rise to power, what made it great, and why it still engages and challenges us today. The first two chapters outline the history and changing identity of Rome from 1000 BC to AD 476. Subsequent chapters examine the mechanisms of government, the economic and social life of Rome, and Roman ways of looking at and reflecting the world. Frequent quotations from ancient writers and numerous illustrations make this a stimulating and accessible introduction to ancient Rome. The World of Rome is particularly designed to serve as a background book to Reading Latin (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Author: Elaine Fantham
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801862014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Beginning with Cicero and his older contemporary Varro, Roman Literary Culture reviews both the public and the more private literary forms of the Augustan Age, when an elite reared on the primacy of Greek culture first confronted - and took pride in - their Roman literary inheritance. By the first century A.D., Fantham explains, Roman models dominated, and a new readership was evolving which included women and non-elite readers in the provinces who benefitted from a newly emerging commercial book trade. The second century brought a recurrence of Greek influence, as celebrated Greek rhetoricians and performers gave rise to a hybrid culture in which Greek and Latin values intertwined. The book concludes with a look at the ecumenical spread of Latin and its perpetuation through Christian literature.
Author: Alison Keith
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442629673
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature, from mid-republican Rome in the second century BC to the Second Sophistic in the second century AD. The contributors explore Latin texts both famous and obscure, from Roman drama and Menippean satire through Latin elegies, epics, and novels to letters issued by Roman emperors and compilations of laws. Each of the essays in this volume combines close reading of Latin literary texts with historical and cultural contextualization, making the collection an accessible and engaging combination of formalist criticism and historicist exegesis that attends to the many ways in which classical Latin literature participated in ancient Roman civic debates.
Author: Jas Elsner
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521430302
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
This is a collection of specially commissioned essays exploring the interface between words and images in the Roman world.
