Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96-138

Description

This volume is the first holistic investigation of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96-138). With case studies from Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus among others, the eighteen chapters offer not just innovative readings of literary (and some 'less literary') texts, but a collaborative enquiry into the networks and culture in which they are embedded. The book brings together established and novel methodologies to explore the connections, conversations and silences between these texts and their authors, both on and off the page. The scholarly dialogues that result not only shed fresh light on the dynamics of literary production and consumption in the 'High Roman Empire', but offer new provocations to students of intertextuality and interdiscursivity across classical literature. How can and should we read textual interactions in their social, literary and cultural contexts?

Alice Koenig is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her research focuses on ancient technical literature and the history of science, and the relationship between politics, society and literature in the early principate. She is preparing a monograph on the author and statesman, Sextus Julius Frontinus, and has published a series of articles on Vitruvius, Frontinus and Tacitus. She established the 'Literary Interactions' research project in 2011, and is co-editor also of its second volume (on cross-cultural interactions in the Roman empire, AD 96-235). Christopher Whitton is Senior Lecturer in Classical Literature at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Emmanuel College. His publications include a commentary on Pliny Epistles 2 (Cambridge, 2013), and he is co-editor (with Roy Gibson) of Oxford Readings in the Epistles of Pliny (2016).

'This collection is a jewel box of polished literary paidia, juxtaposing familiar works in unexpected ways and throwing new light on some well-known textual and authorial relationships.' The Times Literary Supplement