Overview

This collection explores Vergil's engagement with the genre of elegy across various themes, linguistic traditions, and historical periods. Born in 70 BCE, the Roman poet Vergil came of age during a period of literary experimentalism among Latin authors. These authors introduced new Greek verse forms and meters into the existing repertoire of Latin poetic genres and measures, foremost among them being elegy, a genre that the ancients thought originated in funeral lament, but which in classical Rome became first-person poetry about the poet-lover's amatory vicissitudes. Despite the influence of notable elegists on Vergil's early poetry, his critics have rarely paid attention to his engagement with the genre across his body of work. This collection is devoted to an exploration of Vergil's multifaceted relations with elegy. Contributors shed light on Vergil's interactions with the genre and its practitioners across classical, medieval, and early modern periods. The book investigates Vergil's hexameter poetry in relation to contemporary Latin elegy by Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, and the subsequent reception of Vergil's radical combination of epic with elegy by later Latin and Italian authors. Filling a striking gap in the scholarship, Vergil and Elegy illuminates the famous poet's wide-ranging engagement with the genre of elegy across his oeuvre.

Full Product Details

9781487547950

Table of Contents

Reviews

Vergil and Elegy offers the most comprehensive treatment to date of Vergil's relationship to elegy from a broad and satisfying variety of perspectives. Rich and thought-provoking, this collection illuminates not only Vergil's engagement with the genre of elegy but also the impact of his 'elegiac' legacy in later authors from antiquity to modern times. This book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of Vergil's oeuvre, Latin love poetry, and Augustan and imperial literature writ large. - Vassiliki Panoussi, Chancellor Professor of Classical Studies, William & Mary This major collection of critical essays addresses a notable lacuna in Vergilian scholarship: Vergil's sustained interaction with the elegiac genre across his entire oeuvre. Vergil's engagement with Greek and contemporary Latin elegiac poetry and the reception of the 'elegiac Vergil' over sixteen centuries are explored from multiple new perspectives. The authors reveal that the 'soft, ' 'thin' genre of elegy is surprisingly robust and transformative, while Vergil's engagement with the elegiac genre and its poets is far more extensive and innovative than previous scholarship has recognized. - Carole Newlands, Professor of Classics, University of Colorado Boulder

Author Information

Alison Keith is a professor of classics and director of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Micah Y. Myers is an associate professor of classics at Kenyon College.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available