Emotions are at the core of much ancient literature, from Achilles' heartfelt anger in Homer's Iliad to the pangs of love of Virgil's Dido. This volume applies a narratological approach to emotions in a wide range of texts and genres. It seeks to analyze ways in which emotions such as anger, fear, pity, joy, love and sadness are portrayed. Furthermore, using recent insights from affective narratology, it studies ways in which ancient narratives evoke emotions in their readers. The volume is dedicated to Irene de Jong for her groundbreaking research into the narratology of ancient literature.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Linked by their common setting in Thebes, Antigone,Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus stand at the fountainhead of world drama. This volume presents a new, and accurate yet poetic and playable translation by playwright Don Taylor, who has also directed plays for a BBC-TV production.

Affections of the Mind argues that a politicized negotiation of issues of authority in the institution of marriage can be found in late medieval England, where an emergent middle class of society used a sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy. Emma Lipton traces the unprecedented popularity of marriage as a literary topic and the tensions between different models of marriage in the literature of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by analyzing such texts as Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays. Affections of the Mind focuses on marriage as a fluid and contested category rather than one with a fixed meaning, and argues that the late medieval literature of sacramental marriage subverted aristocratic and clerical traditions of love and marriage in order to promote the values of the lay middle strata of society. This book will be of value to a broad range of scholars in medieval studies.

Originally adapted for the stage, Peter Meineck's revised translations achieve a level of fidelity appropriate for classroom use while managing to preserve the wit and energy that led The New Yorker to judge his Clouds The best Greek drama we've ever seen anywhere," and The Times Literary Supplement to describe his Wasps as "Hugely enjoyable and very, very funny. A general Introduction, introductions to the plays, and detailed notes on staging, history, religious practice and myth combine to make this a remarkably useful teaching text.

Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature: Images, Metatexts and Interpretation offers new and penetrating insights into the rhetorical nature of a selection of works from the fourth and fifth centuries, with the intent of providing innovative interpretations that firmly situate these texts within their historical and religious coordinates.

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to "plague writing" from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human "hardware" has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human "software" (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern "plague" fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening "other," Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today's America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.

Rhetorical training was the central component of an elite Roman man's education, and declamations--imaginary courtroom speeches in the character of a fictional or historical individual--were the most advanced exercises in the standard rhetorical curriculum. The Major Declamations is a collection of nineteen full-length Latin speeches attributed in antiquity to Quintilian but most likely composed by a group of authors in the second and third centuries CE. Though there has been a recent revival of interest in Greco-Roman declamation, the Major Declamations has generally been neglected.
Ethics, Identity, and Community in Later Roman Declamation is the first book devoted exclusively to the Major Declamations and its reception in later European literature. It argues that the fictional scenarios of the Major Declamations enable the conceptual exploration of a variety of ethical and social issues. Chapters explore these cultural matters, covering, in turn, the construction of authority, the verification of claims, the conventions of reciprocity, and the ethics of spectatorship. The book closes with a study of the reception of the collection by the Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives and the eighteenth-century scholar Lorenzo Patarol, followed by a brief postscript that deftly surveys the use of declamatory exercises in the contemporary university. This much-needed and engaging study will rescue the Major Declamations from generations of neglect, while critically informing current work in rhetorical studies.

This series gathers together a body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

This volume in the series gathers together a body of critical sources on the literary figure of Thomas Malory. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation.

This series gathers together a body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

These volumes gather together a body of critical sources on the major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

The study of gender in classical antiquity has undergone rapid and wide-ranging development in the past two decades. This collection of new assessments has been written by some of the most influential experts in this field from all over the world. The contributors reassess the role of women in diverse contexts and areas, such as archaic and classical Greek literature and cult, Roman imperial politics, ancient medicine and early Christianity. Some offer original interpretations of topics which have been widely discussed over the last twenty years; others highlight new areas of research.

Women in Antiquity: New Assessments reflects and expands on existing scholarly debates on the status and representation of women in the ancient world. It focuses on methodology, and suggests areas for research and improvement. It is invaluable and engaging reading for all students and teachers of ancient history.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione is one of his central works; it continues to be the focus of much attention and debate. C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system, basing this view upon a detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis. By treating the work systematically, rather than concentrating on certain selected passages, Dr Whitaker is able to show that, contrary to traditional opinion, it forms an organized and coherent whole. He argues that the De Interpretatione is intended to provide the underpinning for dialectic, the system of argument by question and answer set out in Aristotle's Topics ; and he rejects the traditional view that the De Interpretatione concerns the assertion and is oriented towards the formal logic of the Prior Analytics. In doing so, he sheds valuable new light on some of Aristotle's most famous texts.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

"Drawing on new historicist principles, this book examines literary and historical narratives, legal statutes and records, sermons, lyric poetry, and biblical exegesis circulating in England between the 11th and 16th centuries. Jones theorizes the figure of the outlaw in Medieval England and uncovers the legal, ethical, and social assumptions that underlie the practice of outlawry"--

Intercepted Letters examines the phenomenon of epistolarity within a range of classical Greek and Roman texts, with a focus on letters as symbols for larger, culturally constructed processes of reading, writing, and interpretation. In addition, it analyzes how the epistolary form occasionally problematizes-for lack of a better word-the introduction of the technology of writing into cultures already heavily implicated in the authority of the spoken, or sung, word. The methods of intertextuality and reader-response theory that have so revolutionized other aspects of classical scholarship have not, in the main, been applied to epistolarity studies; studies of epistolarity have instead tended to focus on individual collections: Cicero's letters, Pliny's letters, Plato's letters. Epistolarity that occurs in larger narrative contexts (such as tragedy, oratory, and historiography) remains woefully under-theorized; moreover, a consistent thread in the introduction of epistolarity into non-epistolary contexts is that of a destabilizing or dislocating narrative device. Intercepted Letters argues that epistolarity has certain formal features that can be found evenoutside of epistolary collections, including the problematics of communication, an emphasis on authorial absence, a hypersensitivity to interpretation, and an implicit focus on power (who controls the voice?). These aspects are as integral to studies of epistolary episodes as sheep, flutes, shepherds, and amoebic poetry are to pastoral ones, and yet seem to be comparatively neglected, or else formulated as individual observances rather than a pattern. Intercepted Letters thus examines a number of epistolary tropes-in authors as wide-ranging as Euripides, Ovid, and the authors of the Historia Augusta-as it argues for the importance of epistolarity in analyzing the poetics of reading in the ancient world.

Imagining Sex is a study of pornographic writing in seventeenth-century England. It explores a wide variety of written material from the period to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not a discrete genre, nor was it one that was usually subject at this time to suppression. Pornographic writing was a widespread feature of a range of texts, including both popular literature (ballads, news-sheets, court reports, small books, and pamphlets) as well as poetry, drama and more specialised medical books. The book analyses representations of sex, sexuality and eroticism in historical context to explore contemporary thinking about these issues, but also about broader cultural concerns and shifts in attitudes. It questions both modern feminist and psychoanalytical interpretations of pornography, arguing that these approaches are neither appropriate nor helpful to an understanding of seventeenth-century material.
Through discussions of sex and reproduction, homosexuality, flagellation, voyeurism, and humour, the book explores the nature of early modern sexual desire and arousal and explores their relationship to contemporary understandings about how the body worked. Imagining Sex presents a radically new interpretation of pornography in this period, arguing that concerns about fertility were at the heart of representations of bodies and sex, so that images of pleasure were entwined with ideas about conception and reproduction. It also shows that these texts legitimized the (sexual) pleasure of the reader by highlighting the pleasure of looking and the incitement to sexual action that it provided.

The Latin poet Prudentius, born in Spain in the mid-fourth century AD, rose to high office in the imperial secretariat in Milan. His pride in this achievement was tempered by a powerful Christian vocation to the composition of poetry, a medium largely determined by an education in the Latin classics. He is considered to be one of the greatest Christian poets of the Late Antique period. Written at a turning-point in the history of the Western Empire, his poetry gives expression to the new confidence felt by contemporary Christians. Prudentius accepted many aspects of secular poetry and combined them with the new ideals and forms of expression provided by Christianity and its growing literature. He wrote on many subjects, but it is his fourteen lyrics on martyrs, the Peristephanon, several of whom came from his native Spain, which are the subject of this book. Dr Palmer provides here, for the first time, a comprehensive study of these poems, which are so important to our understanding of the post-Constantinian period in the West. She examines the poet's life and society, investigates the purpose of the poems and their intended audience, and discusses them in relation both to the heritage of Classical literature and to sources in contemporary martyr-literature.

A comparative reading of the "literary" works of Thomas Walsingham, highlighting his reaction to contemporary historical events. The literary career of Thomas Walsingham, a significant figure in late fourteenth-century classicist letters in England and an overlooked contemporary of Chaucer, has been neglected - which this book remedies. Following the texts,rather than individuals or institutions, it demonstrates both authors' participation in a previously unrecognized discursive field that spans Latinate clerical prose and secular vernacular poetry, opening for reexamination the "idea" of public literature in the late Middle Ages and recalibrating the terms of the conversation about the advent of humanistic textual practice in England. Providing a connected and comparative reading of Walsingham's works, alongside those of Chaucer, and taking both historical and literary approaches, the book extends our understanding of Chaucer through the exploration of his relationship to the clerical constituencies of London, Oxford, and monasteries in the South-East, and inserts Walsingham into the modern study of the reception of the Latin classics among the vernacular authors of his period. Sylvia Federico is Professor of English and member of the Classical and Medieval Studies Program at Bates College.

The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West examines the relationship between epinician and the heroizing narratives about athletes, or "hero-athlete narratives, " that circulated orally in Sicily and Italy in the late archaic and early classical period. Drawing on the colorful stories told about athletes in later sources, the fragments of Simonides and the surviving odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, it argues that epinician was formed in opposition to orally transmitted narratives and that these two forms-epinician and the "hero-athlete narrative "-promoted opposed political visions, with epinician promoting the Deinomenid empire and its structures and the hero-athlete narrative opposing Deinomenid rule. Combining an intimate knowledge of the material culture of the Greek West with an innovative use of available source material, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West exposes the rich intersections between athletics and politics in Sicily and Italy, offering a new and compelling account of Deinomenid self-promotion and of the varied and complex communities that operated under Deinomenids' control or within their shadow. Further, by establishing models of production and interpretation for the orally transmitted narratives and bringing them into dialogue with epinician, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West reveals much about epinician as a form, how it developed in the West, what meanings it already carried and what meanings it accrued as it was appropriated by Hieron after Gelon's death.

While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle-eighteenth century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has skewed our understanding of British Romanticism as being either a full-scale rejection of classical precedents or an embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produced a changed understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book positions Rome as central to a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French Revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti-democratic, or "right royal." By exposing how Roman references helped structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacted fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book recasts how we view the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle.

The Roman Empire at its height encompassed the majority of the world known to the Romans. This important synthesis of recent findings and scholarship demonstrates how the Romans acquired, kept and controlled their Empire. Lintott goes beyond the preconceptions formed in the period of British Imperial rule and provides a contemporary post-imperial approach to the Roman exercise of power.