Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity

Description

The satirist Juvenal remains one of antiquity's greatest question marks. His Satires entered the mainstream of the classical tradition with nothing more than an uncertain name and a dubious biography to recommend them. Tom Geue argues that the missing author figure is no mere casualty of time's passage, but a startling, concerted effect of the Satires themselves. Scribbling dangerous social critique under a historical maximum of paranoia, Juvenal harnessed this dark energy by wiping all traces of himself - signature, body, biographical snippets, social connections - from his reticent texts. This last major ambassador of a once self-betraying genre took a radical leap into the anonymous. Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity tracks this mystifying self-concealment over the whole Juvenalian corpus. Through probing close readings, it shows how important the missing author was to this satire, and how that absence echoes and amplifies the neurotic politics of writing under surveillance.

Tom Geue is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and has published widely on the literature of imperial Rome. He is currently researching a book on anonymous Roman writing, which also considers how readers now and then cope with the power and problem of anonymity.

'This book is a tour de force of superb writing and meticulous scholarship. It is rare to find a book about Juvenal which is almost as lively as the old satirist himself, but Geue certainly comes closer than the rest of us manage. His thesis is simple and maintained throughout this long but hugely readable book ... The style of this book is eminently readable and entertaining. ... Throughout the book Geue pays great attention to making his own text readable and jargon-free, and he maintains an air of excitement and passion for the text under scrutiny which is as infectious as it is impressive. There is not a dull sentence anywhere, and all students of this wonderful poet will find this book invigorating and enlightening.' Classics For All