The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. In this revised and expanded edition, Alessandro Barchiesi advances innovative approaches even as he recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer. Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as "narrative effects" rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix. For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality. A masterful work of classical scholarship, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative also has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.
In this fresh assessment of Ovid's fascinating poem Fasti, Alessandro Barchiesi provides a new vision of the interaction between Ovid and the renowned ruler Augustus. Fasti, a poem about the holidays and feast days of the Roman calendar, was written while Ovid was in Rome and revised while he was in exile on the barbarian frontier, banished by Augustus from the cultured society of Rome. Ovid's work in exile evinces complicated motives; he addresses Augustus and begs him to lift the despised exile, but at the same time covertly critiques Augustus's "New Rome." Although recent scholarship has concentrated on the oppositions between poet and ruler revealed in Ovid's work, Barchiesi's analysis transcends the opposition of pro-Augustan or anti-Augustan readings. In a lively, vigorous narrative that relies on close textual analysis, Barchiesi underscores the important poetic choices as well as the political considerations made by Ovid in Fasti. Ultimately, his analysis leads us to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between patrons and poets. Both scholars and general readers will find a newly meaningful and interesting Ovid in these pages. Translated with revisions from Il poeta e il principe: Ovido e il discorso Augusteo (1994).
The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. In this revised and expanded edition, Alessandro Barchiesi advances innovative approaches even as he recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer. Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as "narrative effects" rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix. For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality. A masterful work of classical scholarship, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative also has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.
In this fresh assessment of Ovid's fascinating poem Fasti, Alessandro Barchiesi provides a new vision of the interaction between Ovid and the renowned ruler Augustus. Fasti, a poem about the holidays and feast days of the Roman calendar, was written while Ovid was in Rome and revised while he was in exile on the barbarian frontier, banished by Augustus from the cultured society of Rome. Ovid's work in exile evinces complicated motives; he addresses Augustus and begs him to lift the despised exile, but at the same time covertly critiques Augustus's "New Rome." Although recent scholarship has concentrated on the oppositions between poet and ruler revealed in Ovid's work, Barchiesi's analysis transcends the opposition of pro-Augustan or anti-Augustan readings. In a lively, vigorous narrative that relies on close textual analysis, Barchiesi underscores the important poetic choices as well as the political considerations made by Ovid in Fasti. Ultimately, his analysis leads us to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between patrons and poets. Both scholars and general readers will find a newly meaningful and interesting Ovid in these pages. Translated with revisions from Il poeta e il principe: Ovido e il discorso Augusteo (1994).
This monograph is devoted to the most important of Seneca's tragedies, Thyestes, which has had a notable influence on Western drama from Shakespeare to Antonin Artaud. Thyestes emerges as the mastertext of 'Silver' Latin poetry, and as an original reflection on the nature of theatre comparable to Euripides' Bacchae. The book analyses the complex structure of the play, its main themes, the relationship between Seneca's vibrant style and his obsession with dark issues of revenge and regression. Substantial discussion of other plays - especially Trojan Women, Oedipus and Medea - permits a comprehensive re-evaluation of Seneca's poetics and its pivotal role in post-Virgilian literature. Topics explored include the relationship between Seneca's plays and his theory of the emotions, the connection between poetic inspiration and the Underworld, and Seneca's treatment of time, which, in a perspective informed by psychoanalysis, is seen as a central preoccupation of Senecan tragedy.
Feeling History is a study of apostrophe (i.e., the rhetorical device in which the narrator talks directly to his characters) in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Through the narrator's direct addresses, irony, and grotesque imagery, Lucan appears not as a nihilist, but as a character deeply concerned about ethics. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how Lucan's style represents a criticism of the Roman approach to history, epic, ethics, and aesthetics. The book's chief interest lies in the ethical and moral stance that the poet-narrator takes toward his characters and his audience. To this end, Francesca D'Alessandro Behr studies the ways in which the narrator communicates ethical and moral judgments. Lucan's retelling of this central historical epic triggers in the mind of the reader questions about the validity of the Roman imperial project as a whole. An analysis of selected apostrophes from the Bellum Civile allows us to confront issues that are behind Lucan's disquieting imagery: how can we square the poet's Stoic perspectives with his poetically conveyed emotional urgency? Lucan's approach seems inspired by Aristotle, especially his Poetics, as much as by Stoic philosophy. In Lucan's aesthetic project, participation and alienation work as phases through which the narrator leads the reader to a desired understanding of his work of art. At the same time, the reader is confronted with the ends and limits of the aesthetic enterprise in general. Lucan's long-acknowledged political engagement must therefore be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic stance. In the same way that Lucan is unable to break free from the Virgilian model, neither can he develop a defense of morality outside of the Stoic mold. His philosophy is not a crystal ball to read the future or a numbing drug imposing acceptance. The philosophical vision that Lucan finds intellectually and aesthetically compelling does not insulate his characters (and readers) from suffering, nor does it excuse them from wrongdoing. Rather, it obligates them to confront the responsibilities and limits of acting morally in a chaotic world.
This study aims to provide a comparative analysis of the dynamics of musical and poetical meta-performance as they emerge both from the surviving corpus of ancient Attic comedy (which adds up, for our purposes, to Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays) and from Ben Jonson’s comedies. As a matter of fact, both corpora show a huge presence of meta-performative elements, that is, of moments in which musical and/or poetical performance is explicitly thematized or enacted in the drama. Those moments are hardly ever fortuitous, or not significant. On the contrary, they play each time a vital role in the development of the plot, in the portrait of characters, or in the definition of the ideology of the play. By means of a comparative analysis between the two authors, the book aims at providing a taxonomy of meta-performance in Aristophanes and Ben Jonson, with particular attention to its role in the definition of the characters' poetic ability. Such comparison will show that, despite using similar comic and performative strategies, the two authors draw a completely different ideology around the crucial themes of culture and titularity.
Ariosto in the Machine Age reveals how the most influential poet of the Renaissance was conjured or appropriated to shape Magical Realism, avant-garde painting, Fascist cultural propaganda, and cinema in modern Italy between the birth of Futurism and the end of the Second World War. Based on substantial archival findings, bold iconographic hypotheses, and novel interpretations of literary texts, the book proposes a new account of Italy’s twentieth-century culture through a unique take on Ludovico Ariosto’s early modern poetics and legacy. Starting from the unexpected passéism of Futurists visiting Ferrara on the eve of the First World War, it rereads the development of Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical art and Massimo Bontempelli’s Realismo Magico. The book reconstructs the multimedia archive of the Fascist initiatives for the 1933 centennial anniversary of Ariosto’s death, and then focuses on the passage between Fascist cinema and the birth of neorealism, unearthing unfinished adaptations of the Orlando Furioso by Luchino Visconti and Alessandro Blasetti. Questioning the very concept of reception, this radically interdisciplinary book warns twenty-first-century readers about the risks of monumentalizing the "great authors" of the past.
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