Overview

Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry's recurring interest in characters who become lost. Basil Dufallo explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome's empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, Dufallo argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality.Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the ""triumviral"" Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, Dufallo brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons, new identifications-by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a means of interpreting afresh Aeneas' wandering journey in Vergil's Aeneid.

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9780197571781

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Disorienting Empire is an exciting study of Republican Latin poetry and the unsettling transformations that result from travel and cultural contact with new peoples, places, and ideas. It elucidates the complex ways poetic acts of wandering and 'getting lost' connect to Rome's growing imperial world (c. 264-30 BCE), with a particular focus on the friction caused by the integration of the Greek East and its imagined ethnic and sexual otherness.... [It] is distinguished by an often-elegant prose style. It is rarely unclear and reiterates goals and conclusions. A signal merit is the constant movement between broad claims and close philological readings that are rich in their attention to grammatical and stylistic detail. -- Bryn Mawr Classical Review

The book is certainly a model for future research...due to its very nuanced application of postcolonial ideas, which avoids any simple dichotomy of 'victims' and 'conquerors'. Dufallo's readings of the texts are highly insightful throughout. * Greece & Rome * Disorienting Empire is an exciting study of Republican Latin poetry and the unsettling transformations that result from travel and cultural contact with new peoples, places, and ideas. It elucidates the complex ways poetic acts of wandering and 'getting lost' connect to Rome's growing imperial world (c. 264-30 BCE), with a particular focus on the friction caused by the integration of the Greek East and its imagined ethnic and sexual otherness.... [It] is distinguished by an often-elegant prose style. It is rarely unclear and reiterates goals and conclusions. A signal merit is the constant movement between broad claims and close philological readings that are rich in their attention to grammatical and stylistic detail. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

Author Information

Basil Duffalo is Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His previous books include The Captor's Image and The Ghosts of the Past.

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