Author: Rebecca Armstrong Publisher: ISBN: 0199236682 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 341
Book Description
The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This volume joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil's plants and trees to reveal how fundamental they are to an understanding of the poet's outlook on religion, culture, and mankind's place within the world. Divided into two parts, the first explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil's plants, from awe-inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, and shows how both cultivated and uncultivated plants fit within and help to shape the complex landscape of Vergilian (and, more broadly, Roman) religious thought. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts towards human interactions with plants from the perspectives of both cultivation and relaxation, exploring the love-hate relationship with vegetation which sometimes supports and sometimes contests the human self-image as the world's dominant species. Combining a series of close readings of a wide range of passages with the identification of broader patterns of association, Vergil's Green Thoughts appositely reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora.
Author: Andrew Fox Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350237817 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
Focusing on the transitional period of the late Republic to the early Principate, Trees in Ancient Rome offers a sustained examination of the deployment of trees in the ancient city, exploring not only the practicalities of their cultivation, but also their symbolic value. The Ruminal fig tree sheltered the she-wolf as she nursed Romulus and Remus and year's later Rome was founded between two groves. As the city grew, neighbourhoods bore the names of groves and hills were known by the trees which grew atop them. From the 1st century BCE, triumphs included trees among their spoils and Rome's green cityscape grew, as did the challenges of finding room for trees within the congested city. This volume begins with an examination of the role of trees as repositories of human memory, lasting for several generations. It goes on to untangle the import of trees, and their role in the triumphal procession, before closing with a discussion of how trees could be grown in Rome's urban spaces. Drawing on a combination of literary, visual and archaeological sources, it reveals the rich variety of trees in evidence, and explores how they impacted, and were used to impact, life in the ancient city.
Author: Phillip Damon Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520316509 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 80
Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
Author: Katharina Volk Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191547859 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
This volume, together with its companion on the Georgics and the previously published volume on the Aeneid, completes the coverage of Vergil's poetry in Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. It collects ten classic papers on the Eclogues written between 1970 and 1999 by leading scholars from several different countries. The contributions are representative of recent developments in Vergilian scholarship, with some discussing general issues raised by the work and others treating important individual poems and passages. The editor's introduction places the essays in their context. A conspectus of contemporary Eclogues criticism, the book will be helpful to students who are encountering the poems for the first time - all Latin has been translated - and will also serve as a reference work for more seasoned scholars.
Author: Shane Butler Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press ISBN: 0299248232 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us. Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read. All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.
Author: Rebecca Armstrong
Author: Henry Braun
Author: Henry Braun
Author: Andrew Fox
Author: Phillip Damon
Author: Katharina Volk
Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Author: Vanderbilt University
Author: Shane Butler
Author: