Ennian Poetology and Literary Affiliation in Lucretius

Ennius Noster ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 115-146
Author(s):  
Jason S. Nethercut

This chapter adduces Ennius’ own metaphors for literary tradition and affiliation, specifically metempsychosis and the heart, in order to suggest that one of Lucretius’ central aims in the DRN is to undermine Ennius’ literary-historical claims by appropriating and destroying the psychological metaphor that Ennius insisted upon. Lucretius complicates this metaphor while making constant reference to Epicurean physics, thereby literalizing Ennius’ metaphors to show that they are incompatible with the nature of things. As a consequence of investigating how Lucretius goes about correcting Ennius, this chapter argues that Lucretius rejects conventional ideas of literary affiliation and poetology and that he articulates this rejection in terms of the physical first principles of Epicureanism. In short, Lucretius uses Ennius against himself in order to assert the insignificance—and, if we extend Lucretius’ arguments to their logical conclusions, the unreality—of any conventional notion of literary tradition.

1998 ◽  
Vol 93 (6) ◽  
pp. 947-954 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.J. ADAM ◽  
S.J. CLARK ◽  
M.R. WILSON ◽  
G.J. ACKLAND ◽  
J. CRAIN

1998 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 1063-1075
Author(s):  
W. C. Mackrodt, E.-A. Williamson, D. W

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-174
Author(s):  
Terri Gullickson
Keyword(s):  

1981 ◽  
Vol 42 (C6) ◽  
pp. C6-625-C6-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Van Camp ◽  
V. E. Van Doren ◽  
J. T. Devreese

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (12) ◽  
pp. 1025-1029
Author(s):  
Min-Wook Oh ◽  
Tae-Gu Kang ◽  
Byungki Ryu ◽  
Ji Eun Lee ◽  
Sung-Jae Joo ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.


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