Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World
Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World
$130.00
USDCovering a wide variety of Greek and Latin texts that span from the Archaic period down to Late Antiquity, this volume represents the first concerted attempt to understand ancient literary history in its full complexity and on its own terms. Abandoning long-standing misconceptions derived from the misleading application of modern assumptions and standards, the volume rehabilitates an often neglected but fundamentally important subject: the Greeks' and Romans' representations of the origins and development of their own literary traditions. The fifteen contributors to this volume evince the pervasiveness and diversity of ancient literary history as well as the manifold connections between its manifestations in a variety of texts. Taken as a whole, this volume argues that studying ancient literary history should not only provide insight into the Greek and Roman world but also provoke us to think reflexively about how we go about writing the history of ancient literature today.
- Provides a synoptic view of how the standards and methodologies of literary history changed throughout antiquity
- Studies ancient literary history on its own terms rather than through the lens of modern approaches to literary history
- Analyses a vast range of texts and genres, from poetry to oratory to scholarship, and highlights how they are interconnected
Product details
June 2024Hardback
9781009464529
398 pages
229 × 152 × 22 mm
0.752kg
Not yet published - available from May 2025
Table of Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction Giacomo Fedeli and Henry Spelman
- Part I. Between Literature and Scholarship:
- 1. Writing the beginnings of Greek literary history Henry Spelman
- 2. Contrasting pairs and twin graves: companion epigrams and the history of tekhnai Évelyne Prioux
- 3. Ancient histories of satire(s): Horace as an appropriator, innovator and source Giacomo Fedeli
- 4. Cicero as a literary historian Elisa Romano
- 5. Varro and the spirits of Rome's literary past Joseph McAlhany
- Part II. Lives and Afterlives:
- 6. From comedy to literary history Mary Lefkowitz
- 7. Constructing Virgil and his biography Fabio Stok
- 8. 'Another X': duplicating poets in ancient Greek literary history Andrea Rotstein
- 9. Philostratus in verse: poetry and literary history in the Second Sophistic Emma Greensmith
- Part III. Narratives of Change
- 10. Aristotelian teleology in literary criticism: Demetrius, Dionysius and Longinus on the early history of literature Casper de Jonge
- 11. Progress and decline in Roman perspectives on literary history Mario Citroni
- 12. The pleasure of the text? Literacy, orality and programmatics in Lucretius Monica R. Gale
- 13. Plutarch and the history of Greek poetry Richard Hunter
- Epilogue
- 14. The losers' legacy: placing literary fragments in literary history Sandra M. Goldberg
- Afterword: an impossible ending? Simon Goldhill
- Bibliography
- Index of subjects
- Index locorum.
