Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry: Lascivious Poets

Description

How did Latin erotic elegy influence and shape sixteenth-century English love poetry? Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book offers detailed readings of poetry with close attention to the erotic, sometimes problematically 'pornographic', 'wanton' and 'lascivious' verse that exists in both periods. Moving beyond arguments that relate Renaissance eroticism more or less solely back to Ovid and Petrarch, Linda Grant breaks new ground by demonstrating the extent to which a broader sense of classical, specifically Latin, erotics underpins conceptions of sexual love, gender and desire in Renaissance literature. Methodologically sophisticated and moving away from static source study to the dynamism of intertextuality and reception, Grant shows the value of dialogic readings, exploring how elegy speaks to Renaissance poetry and how reading poems from both periods together illuminates both sets of verse.

Linda Grant has been a Teaching Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has also previously taught at Birkbeck College, University of London in both the English and Classics departments, and at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on Renaissance discourses of love and the erotic.

'... the most enjoyable thing about this volume is the author's delight in the poetry she presents to the reader, which is described within the space of a couple of pages as 'exuberant', 'un-anxious', 'creative' and 'confident, even blase', with an 'untroubled "pick-and-mix" approach' to reception that is 'programmatically promiscuous'. For G.,[Linda Grant] Renaissance classical reception is a playful and imaginative adventure-and her enthusiasm carries the reader along.' Cora Beth Knowles, Classics for All