scholarly journals L'uso di epos nella letteratura latina Questioni testuali ed esegetiche (Lucilio, Orazio, Ovidio, Stazio, Marziale) e la definizione in Diomede (GLK III 483.27 ss.)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Boldrer
Keyword(s):  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Definition Of

The contribution explores the use of epos in Latin literature, a very rare and often uncertain term in the manuscript tradition, in contrast with its later fortune. Starting from the examination of the detailed definition of it in Diomedes' Ars grammatica, all the five attestations of epos in Latin poets (Lucilius, Horace, Ovid, Statius and Martial) are examined, evaluating readings and conjectures in the search for the more reliable text, on the basis of the context and parallel passages. Research shows that the term in the Greek-Latin world had a partly different meaning from the current one,  suitable for other literary genres, in addition to the epic poetry.

Phoenician Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Carolina López-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Travel Accounts

There was, without a doubt, a Phoenician and Punic literature. Very little of it is extant, but we have enough of it to gauge the great loss. Lacking the advantage of its own manuscript tradition and later cultures devoted to it, Phoenician literature was not systematically preserved, unlike that of the Greeks, Romans, and Israelites. What we have are small pieces that surface among the Classical literary corpus. Despite these unfavorable conditions, an impressive range of literary genres is attested, concentrated in particular genres. Some of this literature aligned with broader ancient Near Eastern tradition: cosmogony, foundation stories, historical records, and other areas that correspond with Phoenician expertise (travel accounts or itineraries, agricultural treatises). Other genres were likely adopted through Greek influence (narrative histories, philosophy). Moreover, from Hellenistic times onward, works by Phoenician authors had to be written and transmitted in Greek in order to survive. Nonetheless, the chapter cautions that we should not lightly categorize them as merely “Greek” literature, at least in the cases in which we know the authors are Phoenicians (including Carthaginians) writing about Phoenician matters.

Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chaos Theory ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Single Root ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Accessible Form

This book reproduces the texts of four lectures, followed by discussions, and two interviews with Lise Gauvin published in Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996); and also four further interviews from L’Imaginaire des langues (Lise Gauvin, 2010). It covers a wide range of topics but key recurring themes are creolization, language and langage, culture and identity, ‘monolingualism’, the ‘Chaos-world’ and the role of the writer. Migration and the various different kinds of migrants are also discussed, as is the difference between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’ communities, the art of translation, identity as a ‘rhizome’ rather than a single root, the Chaos-World and chaos theory, ‘trace thought’ as opposed to ‘systematic thought’, the relation between ‘place’ and the Whole-World, exoticism, utopias, a new definition of beauty as the realized quantity of differences, the status of literary genres and the possibility that literature as a whole will disappear. Four of the interviews (Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9) relate to particular works that Glissant has published: Tout-monde, Le monde incrée, La Cohée du Lamentin, Une nouvelle région du monde. Many of these themes have been explored in his previous works, but here, because in all the chapters we see Glissant interacting with the questions and views of other people, they are presented in a particularly accessible form.

Conspiracy Literature in Early Renaissance Italy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Celati
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Political Literature ◽  
Narrative Approaches ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Literary Output

The present work represents the first full-length investigation of Italian Renaissance literature on the topic of conspiracy. This literary output consists of texts belonging to different genres that enjoyed widespread diffusion in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the development of these literary writings proves to be closely connected with the affirmation of a centralized political thought and princely ideology in Italian states. The centrality of the issue of conspiracies in the political and cultural context of the Italian Renaissance emerges clearly also in the sixteenth century in Machiavelli’s work, where the topic is closely interlaced with the problems of building political consensus and the management of power. This monograph focuses on the most significant Quattrocento texts examined as case studies (representative of different states, literary genres, and of both prominent authors—Alberti, Poliziano, Pontano—and minor but important literati) and on Machiavelli’s works where this political theme is particularly pivotal, marking a continuity, but also a turning point, with respect to the preceding authors. Through an interdisciplinary analysis across literature, history, philology and political philosophy, this study traces the evolution of literature on plots in early Renaissance Italy, pointing out the key function of the classical tradition in it, and the recurring narrative approaches, historiographical techniques, and ideological angles that characterize the literary transfiguration of the topic. This investigation also offers a reconsideration and re-definition of the complex facets of fifteenth-century political literature, which played a crucial role in the development of a new theory of statecraft.

Marius Maximus and Ausonius' Caesares

1981 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. P. H. Green
Keyword(s):  
Latin Literature ◽  
Lack Of Information ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Historia Augusta

The disappearance of the imperial biographies written by Marius Maximus is one of the more frustrating losses of Latin literature, for various reasons: the well-known testimony of Ammianus, the interest (and frivolity) of Marius Maximus' attested contribution to the Historia Augusta, his importance, much in dispute, to the writer of that work, the lack of information on much of the period he covered, and, not least, the fascinating role assigned to him by modern scholars, remodelling a previous duality of sources, of bad biographer in contrast to the good Ignotus. It has recently become common practice for the evidence of Ausonius' (so-called) Caesares to be used in the search for this biographer. The suggestion goes back to a dissertation of F. della Corte in 1956/7, and was taken up in his edition of Ausonius' works by Pastorino, and discussed in the following year by Cazzaniga who, though uncertain about the dependence of Ausonius on Marius Maximus, does misleadingly assert (perhaps echoing Momigliano) ‘e certo che l'ultima epigramma tocca Elagabalo, che chiude la silloge’. More recently, della Corte has returned to the question and sketched a possible model for the growth of the whole extant collection of Ausonius' Caesares, on the basis of the manuscript tradition. The same volume contains a contribution to the question by S. d'Elia and includes, by a felicitous piece of editing, an extended footnote in which d'Elia is able to comment on the relevant part of della Corte's paper.Meanwhile, outside Italy, there have been parallel and independent developments.

MEDEA: TRANSFORMATIONS OF A GREEK FIGURE IN LATIN LITERATURE

2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesine Manuwald
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Genres

Latin writers in the ancient world are well known to have been familiar with earlier Greek writings, as well as with the first commentaries on those, and to have taken over literary genres as well as topics and motifs from Greece for their own works. But, as has been recognized in modern scholarship, this engagement with Greek material does not mean that Roman writers typically produced Latin copies of pieces by their Greek predecessors. In the terms of contemporary literary terminology, the connection between Latin and Greek literature is rather to be described as an intertextual relationship, which became increasingly complex, since later Latin authors were also influenced by their Roman predecessors.

Meeting of East and West. Interaction of Literatures and Traditions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Far East ◽  
Eastern Region ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Collective Work ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
East And West ◽  
Definition Of

The collective work included articles covering a wide range of issues, but united by one problem: the study of cultural transfer in the works of art in the countries of the East and West, where the East means a region that includes the countries of Africa, the Middle East, Far East and Southeast Asia, and The whole of Europe is included in the West, including Russia. Such a wide geographical scope is determined by the desire to study the mutual influences and ideological image of the phenomena of European, Russian and Oriental literature and cultures; the authors of the articles examine the transformation of the ideological and aesthetic views of European writers in the course of their perception by Eastern writers; analyze the mechanism of adaptation of the phenomena of foreign cultures by Europeans. It is important to study the mechanism for changing the Eurocentric view of the world, the dynamics of the literary process, the definition of the place and role of European literature in the complex process of interaction between the traditional and innovative views of progressive writers who were at the source of the contemporary literature of Eastern countries, including the African continent. The authors of the articles of collective work set as their task the study of the degree of mutual penetration of traditional views and literary and aesthetic concepts of European writers, which gave rise to new literary genres both in the East, and in Russia and Europe. Another task is to understand the internal mechanisms that led to the new status of the eastern region in the global space, the understanding of processes in public and literary thought in these countries and the mutual influence of European and non-European literatures and cultures.

A History of African American Autobiography

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Personal Essays ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

Propertius 3.1.27

Mnemosyne ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Dominicy
Keyword(s):  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Standard Theory ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Made In

The paradosis of Propertius 3.1.27: Idaeum Simoenta Iouis (cunabula parui) is either lacunose (N) or nonsensical (all other manuscripts). Gustav Wolff 's celebrated. . . cum prole Scamandro runs against objections in terms of paleographical verisimilitude, intertextual relevance, and conformity with elegiac diction. This paper provides arguments in favor of. . . ruisse in pabula parta , which echoes two Homeric passages ( Il . 5.773-7, 12.19-22) while pointing, intertextually, to Lucretius and the archaic forms of epic poetry. Paleographically, ruisse in pabula parta can easily have yielded Iouis cunabula parua . Moreover, Petrarch's use of cunabula parua in 1342 suggests that his (lost) copy of Propertius, and the (now incomplete) manuscript A from which it was made in 1333, bore parua . If parui is a later correction, the standard theory, according to which the manuscript tradition of Propertius divides into the N and A families, is vindicated against the alternative theory recently put forward by James L. Butrica and Stephen J. Heyworth.

Latin Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-106
Author(s):  
Rebecca Langlands
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Bellum Civile ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
New Generation

This time last year my review concluded with the observation that the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and that we should proceed in close dialogue with social historians and art historians. In the intervening period, two books from a new generation of scholars have been published which remind us of the existence of an alternative tide that is pushing back against such culturally embedded criticism, and urging us to turn anew towards the aesthetic. The very titles of these works, with their references to ‘The Sublime’ and ‘Poetic Autonomy’ are redolent of an earlier age in their grandeur and abstraction, and in their confident trans-historicism. Both monographs, in different ways, are seeking to find a new means of grounding literary criticism in reaction to the disempowerment and relativism which is perceived to be the legacy of postmodernism. In their introductions, both bring back to centre stage theoretical controversies that were a prominent feature of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s (their dynamics acutely observed by Don Fowler in his own Greece & Rome subject reviews of the period) but which have largely faded into the background; the new generation of Latinists tend to have absorbed insights of New Historicism and postmodernism without feeling the need either to defend their importance or to reflect upon their limitations. Henry Day, in his study of the sublime in Lucan's Bellum civile, explicitly responds to the challenges issued by Charles Martindale, who has, of course, continued (in his own words) to wage ‘war against the determination of classicists to ground their discipline in “history”’. Day answers Martindale's call for the development of some new form of aesthetic criticism, where hermeneutics and the search for meaning are replaced with (or, better, complemented by) experiential analysis; his way forward is to modify Martindale's pure aesthetics, since he expresses doubt that beauty can be wholly free of ideology, or that aesthetics can be entirely liberated from history, context, and politics. Reassuringly (for the novices among us), Day begins by admitting that the question ‘What is the sublime?’ is a ‘perplexing’ one, and he starts with the definition of it as ‘a particular kind of subjective experience…in which we encounter an object that exceeds our everyday categories of comprehension’ (30). What do they have in common, then, the versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, outlined in Chapter 1: the revelatory knowledge afforded to Lucretius through his grasp of atomism, the transcendent power of great literature for Longinus, and the powerful emotion engendered in the Romantics by the sight of impressive natural phenomena such as a mountain range or a thunderstorm? One of the key ideas to emerge from this discussion – crucial to the rest of the book – is that the sublime is fundamentally about power, and especially the transference of power from the object of contemplation to its subject. The sublime is associated with violence, trauma, and subjugation, as it rips away from us the ground on which we thought we stood; yet it does not need to be complicit with the forces of oppression but can also work for resistance and retaliation. This dynamic of competing sublimes of subjugation and liberation will then help us, throughout the following chapters, to transcend the nihilism/engagement dichotomy that has polarized scholarship on Lucan in recent decades. In turn, Lucan's deployment of the sublime uses it to collapse the opposition between liberation and oppression, and thus the Bellum civile makes its own contribution to the history of the sublime. This is an impressive monograph, much more productively engaged with the details of Lucan's poem than this summary is able to convey; it brought me to a new appreciation of the concept of the sublime, and a new sense of excitement about Lucan's epic poem and its place in the Western tradition.

To Translate or Not to Translate? 19th Century Ottoman Communities and Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-222
Author(s):  
Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Statistical Interpretation ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Bibliographic Data ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
European Standards ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Print Cultures

In the 19th century, Turcophone communities of the Ottoman Empire displayed a keen interest in European fiction. This study questions whether translating European works was simply linguistic substitution or rather had intrinsic dimensions such as cultural appropriation. It also investigates the reciprocity of literary production, and offers some observations on how translation influences and inspires “the making of literature”. The methods used are mainly based on statistical interpretation of bibliographic data and comparative sociological analysis. Turkish works printed in Arabic, Armenian and Greek alphabets are the objects of investigation. The findings demonstrate that translation in the Ottoman mind is actually an active literary appropriation primarily due to differences in the criterion of “modern fiction” from European standards where the differences are exaggerated by the Ottoman notion of translation, lending the translator liberating space and opportunity to interfere with the original text. Moreover, the intermingling between the oral and print cultures that obscures the definition of literary genres adds another level of complexity. It is also revealed that the millets of the Empire affected each other’s choice and taste resulting in a web of interactions that exhibit the literary market and literary “canon” of the period.


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