Unspoken Rome
Unspoken Rome
Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which functions as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of these texts. Reviewing and working with various influential approaches to textual absence, the contributors to Unspoken Rome treat these texts as silent types, listening out for what they do not say, and how they do not speak, whilst also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built.
- Analyses textual absence and fragmentation as a phenomenon that can help rather than hinder our understanding of Latin literature
- Bridges the gap between historicism and formalism in the study of Latin literature
- Explores classical reception as integral to the practice of reading Latin literature rather than functioning as an appendix to the discipline.
Product details
March 2023Paperback
9781108823319
389 pages
228 × 150 × 19 mm
0.64kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Tom Geue and Elena Giusti
- Part I. Absence in Text:
- 1. Catullus' Sapphic lacuna: A Palimpsest of Absences and Presences Ábel Tamás
- 2. Speaking Aposiopeseis: The (Generic) Sound of Silence in Statius' Thebaid Stefano Briguglio
- 3. Allegorical Absences: Virgil, Ovid, Prudentius and Claudian Philip Hardie
- 4. Tamen Apsentes Prosunt Pro Praesentibus: Proxied Absences and Roman Comedy Giuseppe Pezzini
- 5. Absence Left Wanting: The Groove in Ovid's Remedia Victoria Rimell
- 6. The Gaze on the Void: Hermeneutic Responses to Dido's First Appearance Viola Starnone
- Part II. Absence in Context:
- 7. Speaking Silence in Cicero's Brutus and Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus Kathrin Winter
- 8. Et Sine Auctore Notissimi Uersus: Unauthored Poetry and Rome's Authoritative Turn Barbara Del Giovane
- 9. Looking for the Emperor in Seneca's Letters Catharine Edwards
- 10. Marcus Aurelius: Medi()ations not Medi(c)ations John Henderson
- 11. Lost in Germania: The Absence of History in Tacitus' Ethnography James Mcnamara
- 12. Conspicuous Absence: Tacitus' de Re Publica Ellen O'gorman
- Part III. Going Beyond:
- 13. The Slave, Between Absence and Presence William Fitzgerald
- 14. In Search of the Lost City: The Enduring Absence of Pompeii Joanna Paul
- 15. Omnibus Umbra Locis Adero: Elena Ferrante and the Poetics of Absence Francesca Bellei
- 16. The Philology of Grief: Catullus 101 and Anne Carson's Nox Erik Fredericksen
- 17. Absence, Metaphysically Speaking: From Reception to Instauration? Duncan Kennedy
- 18. Afterword: Lights Out Emily Gowers.
