Classical Literary Careers and their Reception

Description

This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman literary careers and their reception in later European literature, with contributions by leading experts. Starting from the three major Roman models for constructing a literary career - Virgil (the rota Vergiliana), Horace and Ovid - the volume then looks at alternative and counter-models in antiquity: Propertius, Juvenal, Cicero and Pliny. A range of post-antique responses to the ancient patterns is examined, from Dante to Wordsworth, and including Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Goethe. These chapters pose the question of the continuing relevance of ancient career models as ideas of authorship change over the centuries, leading to varying engagements and disengagements with classical literary careers. The volume also considers other ways of concluding or extending a literary career, such as bookburning and figurative metempsychosis.

Philip Hardie is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is a leading figure in Latin literary studies, a Fellow of the British Academy, and author of books on Virgil, Ovid and other Latin poets. He also has strong interests in the Renaissance reception of classical literature, and is co-editor (with Patrick Cheney) of the Renaissance volume in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 2012). Helen Moore is a University Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She has published editions of Amadis de Gaule (2004) and Guy of Warwick (2007), and is currently working on a book on the English reception of Amadis de Gaule.

'... one of the best features of the collection is the editors' decision to extend the chronological focus ... This collection is especially interesting as, in addition to the chapters on Latin poetry, there are substantial discussions of Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Goethe, and Wordsworth.' Stephen Guy-Bray, Comparative Literature Studies '... the Roman writers included here are discussed in a most interesting way ... all these articles can be described as offering professionally, yet also entertainingly formulated views on the discussed writer's careers and show how models from classical literature were interpreted and in many cases reinvented.' Tiina Purola, Arctos 'This volume fruitfully applies to aspects of Latin literature and its reception the goals and techniques of 'career criticism', that emergent branch of literary study which asks how a writer's oeuvre shapes or perceives itself as a totality, be it prospectively, concurrently or in retrospect, and whether in relation to its own internal stages of development or in relation to the extra textual circumstances of its production ... a welcome, and very significant, expansion of career studies as a method for Roman literary history, not least because it will doubtless provoke further research in this rich area.' Gareth Williams, The Classical Review