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Printing--History--16th century

In this work Craig Kallendorf argues that the printing press played a crucial, and previously unrecognized, role in the reception of the Roman poet Virgil in the Renaissance, transforming his work into poetry that was both classical and postclassical.

Pastoral poetry, English--History and criticism

Dubbed'the English Virgil'in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the'Virgilian career'into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.

Nationalism in literature

James Joyce's Ulysses is a modern version of Homer's Odyssey, but Joyce—who was a better scholar of Latin than of Greek—also was deeply influenced by the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem about the journey of Aeneas and the foundation of Rome. Joyce wrote Ulysses during the Irish War of Independence, when militants, politicians, and intellectuals were attempting to create a new Irish nation. Virgil wrote the Aeneid when, in the wake of decades of civil war, Augustus was founding what we now call the Roman Empire. Randall Pogorzelski applies modern theories of nationalism, intertextuality, and reception studies to illuminate how both writers confronted issues of nationalism, colonialism, political violence, and freedom during times of crisis.

Epic poetry, Latin--History and criticism

At the end of the Thebaid, Statius enjoins his epic'not to compete with the divine Aeneid but rather to follow at a distance and always revere its footprints'. The nature of the Thebaid's interaction with the Aeneid is, however, a matter of debate. This 2007 book argues that the Thebaid reworks themes, scenes, and ideas from Virgil in order to show that the Aeneid's representation of monarchy is inadequate. It also demonstrates how the Thebaid's fascination with horror, spectacle, and unspeakable violence is tied to Statius'critique of the moral and political virtues at the heart of the Aeneid. Professor Ganiban offers both a way to interpret the Thebaid and a largely sequential reading of the poem.

The Aeneid is a landmark of literary narrative and poetic sensibility. This 2004 guide gives a full account of the historical setting and significance of Virgil's epic, and discusses the poet's use of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the most celebrated episodes in the poem, including the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas'visit to the underworld. The volume examines Virgil's psychological and philosophical insights, and explains the poem's status as the central classic of European culture. The final chapter considers the Aeneid's influence on later writers including Dante and the Romantics. The guide to further reading has been updated and will prove to be an invaluable resource to students coming to The Aeneid for the first time.

Fratantuono and Smith provide the first detailed consideration of Book 5 of Virgil's Aeneid, with introduction, critical text, translation and commentary.

In this book, conceived as a sort of Prolegomena to his two Teubner editions, Conte gives account of his choices in editing his Virgilian text. Engaging in a passionate debate with his predecessors and critics, he guides the reader in a fascinating journey in the history of transmission and interpretation of Georgics and Aeneid and shows how lively textual criticism can be.

Agriculture in literature and Didactic poetry, Latin--History and criticism

Presents a popular introduction to Virgil's Georgics for the general reader.Though John Dryden once called the Georgics “the best Poem of the best Poet,” and Montaigne thought it the most highly finished work in all of poetry, Virgil's song of the earth has never won as many readers as has his Aeneid, and at present it is the subject of more debate among classicists than perhaps any other poem in Latin. Using a Jungian approach, this book draws on the new commentaries in English as well as on the work of the great German Virgilians of the past, and is written in the eloquent, accessible, and personal style for which its author has become known. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of the poem, discusses the sound of Virgil's hexameters, and treats each of the four georgics in detail, with special emphasis on the concluding myth of Orpheus. The most baffling of all Latin poems is shown in these pages to be Virgil's gift to Augustus, the most powerful man in the world as the salvational leader of the renewed Roman state, telling him what he must know about nature and about human nature if he is to rule the world well.M. Owen Lee is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Fathers and Sons in Virgil's Aeneid and Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia, both published by SUNY Press. He has also written books on Horace's Odes and Wagner's Ring, and is an internationally known commentator on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

Aeneas--In literature and Epic poetry, Latin--History and criticism

Love and tragedy dominate book four of Virgil's most powerful work, building on the violent emotions invoked by the storms, battles, warring gods, and monster-plagued wanderings of the epic's opening. Destined to be the founder of Roman culture, Aeneas, nudged by the gods, decides to leave his beloved Dido, causing her suicide in pursuit of his historical destiny. A dark plot, in which erotic passion culminates in sex, and sex leads to tragedy and death in the human realm, unfolds within the larger horizon of a supernatural sphere, dominated by power-conscious divinities. Dido is Aeneas'most significant other, and in their encounter Virgil explores timeless themes of love and loyalty, fate and fortune, the justice of the gods, imperial ambition and its victims, and ethnic differences. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, study questions, a commentary, and interpretative essays. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Virgil's poetry and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.

Aeneas (Legendary character) in literature and Epic poetry, Latin--History and criticism

Working “in the shadow of Eduard Norden” in the author's own words, Nicholas Horsfall has written his own monumental commentary on Aeneid 6. This is Horsfall's fifth large-scale commentary on the Aeneid, and as his earlier commentaries on books 7, 11, 3, and 2, this is not a commentary aimed at undergraduates. Horsfall is a commentators'commentator writing with encyclopedic command of Virgilian scholarship for the most demanding reader. Volume One includes the introduction, text and translation, and bibliography, Volume Two includes the commentary, appendices, and indices.

Repetition in literature

Virgil the Blind Guide examines the repetition of certain linguistic configurations that have remained hidden because the meanings of the words involved do not relate to Virgil's competence as guide. Uncovering tropes that have yet to be studied, Howard allows us to see new junctures in the poet's travels, while highlighting Virgil's impotence and diminishing his authority as regards other poets, guides, and the demons of Hell's lower gate. The concealed route revealed by Dante's figurative signposts establishes Virgil's traits as foundational to the poem and allows for new perspectives and understandings of this critical character. Using this distinctive strategy, Virgil the Blind Guide helps us to piece together the complex puzzle that is Dante's pagan guide and suggests new ways of understanding important characters that are applicable to a broad range of poetry and prose.

Epic poetry, Latin--History and criticism

Introduction, text and translation, detailed commentary and indices to Aeneid 2 are here offered on a scale not previously attempted and in keeping with the author's previous Virgil commentaries (Aeneid 3, 7 and 11); the volume is aimed primarily at scholars, rather than undergraduates.

Poetry

At once uncompromising and highly inventive, David Lau's poems are imbued with a musicality that lightens the dark undertones of spoliation and entropy. Many of the poems embody a nexus of interaction with historical events, films, modernist poetic texts, and works of art—but from this allusion and evocation, a multifarious voice emerges. In these pages, the electric linguistic experiment meets a new urban, postnatural poetics, one in which poetry is not just a play of signs and seemings but also a prismatic investigation of our contemporary order:'Hurry up before our factory leaves. / The first column of the Freedom Tower / traduces its ensorcellment in the facade.'Here is a poetry both deeply lyrical and resistant, a poetry relentless in its invention and its stance against the apathy of convention and consumption.

Latin literature, Roman history, Virgil, Roman culture, Roman society, Latin poetry, Augustan society, primitive Italy, Augustan propaganda, Latin poets, Classical Philosophy, and Classical Poetry

This is a posthumous selection of 42 articles from the 150 which Nicholas Horsfall (1946–2019) wrote over a span of fifty years. Horsfall was prodigiously learned and, although best known for his five massive and dauntingly erudite commentaries on Virgil, was both a Latinist and a Romanist; the selection exemplifies the wide range of his interests and the coherence of his approach. Many of the Virgilian papers, which form the majority of the selection, are classics, and all of them command attention. This Virgilian concentration does not detract, however, from the extreme interest and value of the non-Virgilian papers, several of which were far ahead of their time and have led to standard treatments of their subjects, and all of which remain thought-provoking. Horsfall delighted in publishing in a wide variety of journals in many different countries, and he wrote in more than one language. Five of the papers (including his ground-breaking paper on Camilla) appear here in an English translation for the first time; almost half the papers are not online or easily found. The collection illustrates well his intellectual curiosity and his need to keep searching and asking questions while accepting that there may be no answers: ‘it has become, in some quarters, difficult or dangerous to say we do not know or, worse, “we cannot know”, or so much as hint that there is something disquieting about the evidence that remains’ (‘The Prehistory of Latin Poetry’).

Reader-response criticism

The Protean Virgil argues that when we try to understand how and why different readers have responded differently to the same text over time, we should take into account the physical form in which they read the text as well as the text itself. Using Virgil's poetry as a case study in book history, the volume shows that a succession of material forms - manuscript, printed book, illustrated edition, and computer file - undermines the drive toward textual and interpretive stability. This stability is the traditional goal of classical scholarship, which seeks to recover what Virgil wrote and how he intended it to be understood. The manuscript form served to embed Virgil's poetry into Christian culture, which attempted to anchor the content into a compatible theological truth. Readers of early printed material proceeded differently, breaking Virgil's text into memorable moral and stylistic fragments, and collecting those fragments into commonplace books. Furthermore, early illustrated editions present a progression of re-envisionings in which Virgil's poetry was situated within a succession of receiving cultures. In each case, however, the material form helped to generate a method of reading Virgil which worked with this form but which failed to survive the transition to a new union of the textual and the physical. This form-induced instability reaches its climax with computerization, which allows the reader new power to edit the text and to challenge the traditional association of Virgil's poetry with elite culture.