Overview

Here ten scholars examine poetic texts of wisdom and teaching related to the line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. Previous scholarship has grappled with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre and as a result has often focused on defining and classifying didactic poetry. The present volume approaches didactic texts from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient Near-Eastern and contemporary African traditions). Issues include knowledge in its relation to power; cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; authority of the teacher.

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9781910589793

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Reviews

This valuable volume offers new avenues to an ancient genre that is notoriously hard to define. * Latomus *

Author Information

Lilah Grace Canevaro is author of Hesiod’s Works and Days: How to Teach Self-Sufficiency (OUP, 2015) and Women of Substance in Homeric Epic: Objects, Gender, Agency (OUP, 2018). Her research centres on ancient Greek poetry, with a focus on gender. She pioneers new-materialist approaches to classical study, and has published also on classical reception and comparative literature. Dr Canevaro is Lecturer in Greek at the University of Edinburgh. Donncha O'Rourke has published extensively on the poetry of the late Roman republic and early empire, especially the elegiac and didactic genres, with a particular focus on their intertextuality with other literary and philosophical texts. Forthcoming work includes historian's monograph Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility (Cambridge) and an edited collection on Approaches to Lucretius (Cambridge). Dr O'Rourke is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh.

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