Alison Sharrock

Rhiannon Ash

Alison (University of Manchester Sharrock, UK)

Rhiannon (University College London Ashley, UK)

A chronological guide to influential Greek and Roman writers, Fifty Key Classical Authors is an invaluable introduction to the literature, philosophy and history of the ancient world. Including essays on Sappho, Polybius and Lucan, as well as on major figures such as Homer, Plato, Catullus and Cicero, this book is a vital tool for all students of classical civilization.

Fifty Key Classical Authors

Rhiannon Ashley

Mats Malm

Daniel Möller

Ovid's remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best-known and most popular works of classical literature, exerting a pervasive influence on later European literature and culture. A vast repository of mythic material as well as a sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences. As the poem's focus on transformation and transgression connects in many ways with contemporary culture and society, modern research perspectives have developed correspondingly. Metamorphic Readings presents the state of the art in research on this canonical Roman epic. Written in an accessible style, the essays included represent a variety of approaches, exploring the effects of transformation and the transgression of borders. The contributors investigate three main themes: transformations into the Metamorphoses (how the mythic narratives evolved), transformations in the Metamorphoses (what new understandings of the dynamics of metamorphosis might be achieved), and transformations of the Metamorphoses (how the Metamorphoses were later understood and came to acquire new meanings). The many forms of transformation exhibited by Ovid's masterpiece are explored—including the transformation of the genre of mythic narrative itself.

Transformation, Language, and Gender in the Interpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses

Metamorphic Readings

Roy Gibson

Steven Green

A collection of essays on Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love, The Art of Love and Cures for Love, written by leading scholars and offering a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems.

Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

The Art of Love

The Ars Amatoria is a poem about sex and poetry, and poetry as sex. Witty and subversive, it is a poem of seduction about seduction: the seduction of the 'implied' reader being initiated into the art of love, and ourselves, as we are seduced by the poet into the act of reading the poem. This book offers a new and sophisticated critical assessment of the poem, based on the close analysis of certain passages, whilst at the same time being concerned with the reading of Ovidian poetry generally. Dr Sharrock's study is overtly theoretical, influenced in particular by deconstruction and reader-response theory, with an emphasis on intertextuality. In it she discusses a range of original and important issues: the traditions of didactic poetry and of elegy; the nature of the addressee in literature; the relationship between author and reader, speaker, and addressee; poetic self-display; digression and relevance; programmatic theory and poetic value under the sign of Callimachus. This is an important and innovative work, which should be of interest not only to classicists but also to literary critics and theorists in English and other literatures.

Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2

The Art of Love celebrates the bi-millennium of Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love, traditionally assumed to have been brought to completion around AD 2. Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), which purport to teach young Roman men and women how to be good lovers, were partly responsible for the poet's exile from Rome under the emperor Augustus. None the less they exerted great influence over ancient and later love poetry. This is the first collection in English devoted to the poems, and brings together many of the leading figures in the field of Latin literature and Ovidian studies from the British Isles, Germany, Italy, and the United States. It offers a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems, beginning with a critical survey of recent research, and concluding with papers on the ancient, medieval, and modern reception of the poems.

For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance. The texts are treated, and celebrated, as literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends, and intertexts. All the extant plays of Plautus and Terence have at least a bit part in this book, which seeks to expose the authors' fabulous artificiality and artifice, while playing along with their differing but interrelated poses of generic humility.

Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence

Reading Roman Comedy

Ovid's remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best-known and most popular works of classical literature, exerting a pervasive influence on later European literature and culture. A vast repository of mythic material as well as a sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences. As the poem's focus on transformation and transgression connects in many ways with contemporary culture and society, modern research perspectives have developed correspondingly. Metamorphic Readings presents the state of the art in research on this canonical Roman epic. Written in an accessible style, the essays included represent a variety of approaches, exploring the effects of transformation and the transgression of borders. The contributors investigate three main themes: transformations into the Metamorphoses (how the mythic narratives evolved), transformations in the Metamorphoses (what new understandings of the dynamics of metamorphosis might be achieved), and transformations of the Metamorphoses (how the Metamorphoses were later understood and came to acquire new meanings). The many forms of transformation exhibited by Ovid's masterpiece are explored--including the transformation of the genre of mythic narrative itself.

Alison Keith

This book explores motherhood in Greek and Roman literature, focusing on images of mothers and their relationships with their children across a variety of genres.

Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy

Daryn Lehoux

A. D. Morrison

The volume unites the three aspects - poetry, philosophy, and science - found in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. With ten original essays and an analytical introduction, the volume aims not only to combine different approaches within single covers, but to offer responses to the poem by experts from all three scholarly backgrounds.

Alison Sharrock

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