Homer and the Epic Cycle

How can the ancient relationship between Homer and the Epic Cycle be recovered? Using findings from the most significant research in the field, many ancient and modern assumptions are questioned and alternative perspectives offered that are better aligned with ancient epic performance realities and modern epic studies. This volume addresses a number of related issues: the misrepresentation of Cyclic (and Homeric) epic by Aristotle and his inheritors (including the part played by mythographers like Proclus); the role of the epic singer, patron/collector, and scribe/poet in the formation of memorialized songs; the relevance of shared patterns and devices and of other traditional connections between ancient epics; and the distinct fates of Homeric (Iliad, Odyssey) and Cyclic epic. The volume provides new answers to an age-old problem.

Post-Classical Greek Elegy and Lyric Poetry

This volume traces the development of Greek elegy and lyric in the hands of Hellenistic and Roman-era poets, from literary superstars such as Callimachus and Theocritus to more obscure, often anonymous authors. Designed as a guide for advanced students and scholars working in adjacent fields, this volume introduces and explores the diverse body of surviving later Greek elegy and lyric, contextualizes it within Hellenistic and Roman culture and politics, and surveys contemporary critical interpretations, methodological approaches, and avenues for future study.

Ovid

In this volume, Francesca Martelli outlines some of the main contours of recent, current and future research on Ovid. Her study looks back to the rehabilitation of Ovid’s oeuvre in the 1980s, and considers the post-modern aesthetic prerogatives and post-structuralist theoretical concerns that drove the critical recuperation of his poetry throughout that decade and in the decades that followed. But it also looks forward, by considering how the themes of this poet’s oeuvre answer to a variety of new materialist concerns that are now gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences. It highlights the ecopoetic sensibility of the Metamorphoses, for example, and unpacks the environmental narratives that this poem yields when read in dialogue with the discourses of critical posthumanism. And it closes by considering the hauntological aesthetics of Ovid’s exile poetry as a comment on the effects of the principate on time, space, media, and art.

Roman Comedy

This contribution provides an introduction to all varieties of ‘Roman comedy’, including primarily fabula palliata (‘new comedy’, as represented by Plautus and Terence) as well as fabula togata, fabula Atellana, mimus and pantomimus. It examines the major developments in the establishment of these dramatic genres, their main characteristics, the performance contexts for them in Republican Rome, and their reception. The presentation of the key facts is accompanied by a description of the influential turns and recent trends in scholarship on Roman comedy. The essay is designed for scholars, teachers and (graduate) students who have some familiarity with Roman literature and are looking for (further) orientation in the area of Roman comedy.

Greek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods

What is distinctive about Greek lyric poetry? How should we conceptualize it in relation to broader categories such as literature / song / music / rhetoric / history? What critical tools might we use to analyze it? How do we, should we, can we relate to its intensities of expression, its modes of address, its uses of myth and imagery, its attitudes to materiality, its sense of its own time, and its contextualizations? These are the questions that this discussion seeks to investigate, exploring and analysing a range of influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.