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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > Classical, early & medieval
This is the first book-length critical study of the three Virgilian works to be published in English for twenty years. It examines in detail the thematic design and intent of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, and documents the development of their political, moral and poetic pessimism. It presents the interrelationship of the three texts, their intertextuality, as integral to their meaning. The book is in three main parts - 'Pastoral Meditation', 'Didactic Paradox', 'Epic Vision' - corresponding to the three Virgilian works. A brief introductory chapter is concerned with questions of method and the problem of Virgil misread. A chief focus of the book is Virgil's preoccupation with the relationship between poetry, art - art's values, perceptions, visions - and the political/historical world, and the changing nature of Virgil's attitude to the socio-moral responsibilities of Rome. The evolution of Vergil's presentation both of Roman imperium and of man's place in nature and history is carefully delineated. With close scrutiny of the language, imagery, structures and design of the three texts and of their verbal and thematic interrelationship, the book offers a substantial reassessment of the major political, psychological and moral ideas of Virgil's poetic oeuvre. An intricate and persuasive picture emerges of Virgil's intellectual and poetic development and a radically new conception of Virgil's image of himself as poet. The provision of translations makes the book accessible to the Latinless reader.
Little attention has been focused on the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study analyzes the role of Muslims in several core texts representing drama, epic, and lyric written by the most important writers of medieval Germany. Far from simply adding medieval Germany to the growing scholarly list of the 'pre-post-colonializing' European cultures, this study provides important new perspectives.
Gregory Dobrov's Figures of Play explores the reflexive aspects of ancient theatrical culture across genres. Fifth-century tragedy and comedy sublimated the agonistic basis of Greek civilization in a way that invited the community of the polis to confront itself. In the theatre, as in the courts and assemblies, a significant subset of the Athenian public was spectator and judge of contests where important social and ideological issues were played to it by its own members. The "syntax" of drama is shown to involve specific "figures of play" through which the theatrical medium turns back upon itself to study the contexts of its production. Figures of Play is at the forefront of new developments in scholarly approaches to the Greek theatre, bringing the younger methods of literary criticism and performance theory to bear on the study of classics.
This book demonstrates that the Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c. AD 45-120) are far more than simply `sources' for history. A vast retrospective series of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen, written when Greece was under Roman rule, they aim both to inculcate in the reader the virtues of Greek philosophy and to champion the supremacy of Greek culture against a dominant Rome. As Dr Duff argues, they explore and challenge issues of psychology, education, morality, and cultural identity.
From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.
The cento-tragedy Medea usually attributed to Hosidius Geta was transmitted in the Codex Salmasianus (now Codex Parisinus 10318). This is a comprehensive study and reevaluation of the text against the background of the ancient cento tradition, also providing a new English translation. After developing a new definition of the ancient conception of the cento in general, Geta's cento technique and his use of the Vergilian text as well as his relation to the Greek and Roman models for his Medea are examined. It is shown that his play is innovative and sophisticated in both technique and content.
Representation of desiring subjects in the novel is one of the most illuminating issues in the area of ancient gender and sexuality, for such narratives subject societal norms to acute critique. This volume brings together fourteen essays originally given as oral presentations at the Fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN IV), held in Lisbon in July 2008. Employing feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, each offers a provocative investigation of sexual subjectivity as presented in the text or texts under discussion. The collection as a whole demonstrates the gradual convergence of formerly distinct norms of gendered behavior under pressure of emerging social realities.The editors of this volume are all well-known scholars in the fields of ancient narrative and/or ancient sexuality. Contributors include leading experts in these fields and emerging scholars whose research suggests directions for future exploration.
The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio is one of the most discussed sources for the Norman Conquest of England. Its authorship and date cannot be established entirely beyond dispute, but the weight of scholarly opinion supports a date of composition of 1068 or earlier, by Guy, bishop of Amiens, thus making it the earliest surviving account. Whatever its date, the Carmen remains a source of intrinsic interest and importance, and one used by some of the great chroniclers of the period, such as Orderic Vitalis. It is an epic poem, concerned with some of the most momentous events of a remarkable year, in which Halley's comet was a disturbing portent of undisclosed disasters. For this second edition, Frank Barlow has written an entirely new and substantial historical introduction, incorporating the scholarly research of a generation. He has also provided a fresh translation and notes, as well as revising the Latin text of the 1972 edition by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz.
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual publication which includes original articles, which may be of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. 'an excellent periodical' Mary Margaret MacKenzie, Times Literary Supplement 'This . . . annual collection . . . has become standard reading among specialists in ancient philosophy. . . . Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy continues to reflect the vigour of a challenging but vital sub-discipline within Classical Studies and Philosophy.' Brad Inwood, Bryn Mawr Classical Review [NB: please list contents in catalogues and other publicity material.]
A major work of Latin literature, Tristia 2 is a verse letter addressed by the exiled poet Ovid to the man who banished him from Rome, the emperor Augustus. Ovid apologizes to Augustus for the misdemeanours that led to his banishment, but, more importantly, defends both his life and his poetry in light of the accusation that his earlier Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) had promoted adultery. Jennifer Ingleheart's commentary, the most up-to-date and comprehensive one available, is an invaluable guide to all aspects of the poem - textual, literary, historical, and political - while her Introduction explores, among other topics, its ironical and subversive aspects.
Despite the large number of early Greek inscribed epigrams and their historical and social importance, modern studies have focused either on the literary epigram or (especially after the publication of Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca) on the inscribed funerary epigram. The dedicatory inscribed epigram, on the other hand, has received little scholarly attention. As a result, neither a comprehensive commentary nor a study of the different features (archaeological, epigraphical, literary and linguistic) of Archaic and Classical inscribed verse dedications has appeared to date. This book aims to fill such a significant void by offering an interdisciplinary commentary on all the early Attic dedicatory epigrams, i.e. those dating from the 7th through the 5th century BCE. Since the message conveyed by an inscribed epigram can be understood only by taking into account three different semantic systems - that of art and archaeology, epigraphy, and that of language and style - at the same time, this commentary will combine a description of the morphology of the monuments on which the epigrams were engraved with an analysis of the alphabets and dialects used in the poems, while making observations on stylistic and literary data.
Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature. Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.
In Speech-in-Character, Diatribe, and Romans 3:1-9, Justin King argues that the rhetorical skill of speech-in-character (prosopopoiia, sermocinatio, conformatio) offers a methodologically sound foundation for understanding the script of Paul's imaginary dialogue with an interlocutor in Romans 3:1-9. King focuses on speech-in-character's stable criterion that attributed speech should be appropriate to the characterization of the speaker. Here, speech-in-character helps to inform which voice in the dialogue speaks which lines, and the general goals of diatribe help shape how an "appropriate" understanding of the script is best interpreted. King's analyses of speech-in-character, diatribe, and Romans, therefore, make independent contributions while simultaneously working together to advance scholarship on a much debated passage in one of history's most important texts.
Shortlisted for the 2011 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies Tolkien's unparalleled popularity has been largely attributed to his gifts as a storyteller and his thematic currency. But "The Lord of the Rings" may have become a modern classic for a deeper reason than we've noticed: Tolkien is a first-rate stylist. "The Power of Tolkien's Prose "illuminates the multifaceted appeal of Tolkien's prose style in dimensions ranging from his fantastic realism to his revitalizing imagery to his dynamic narrative to his expansive characterization to his engaging language. Viewed through the lens of Steve Walker's stylistic appreciation, Tolkien's fiction emerges as a new dimension of perception.
There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence, correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism and literature. Thus, Sympathy in Transformation offers important insights into the many ways in which, when sympathy migrates into diverse discourses in Early Modernity, its ancient origins dwindle out of sight, while some of its central elements re-emerge in a surprising manner.
Emily Francomano explores how medieval & early modern writers reconstructed, & also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of 'Lady' Wisdom.
Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France as in other European countries. The vogue for allegorical buildings was, however, more than a literary fashion: by deploying familiar metaphors of the building in new contexts, writers gained a powerful tool of persuasion. This book explores the complex relationship between metaphor and allegory in the largely neglected but extremely rich corpus of writing that spans the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century in France, and concentrates on the output of Jean Lemaire (c.1473-after 1515), whose fascination with architecture played a crucial role in defining his self-image as a writer. By exploiting the semantic richness of the image of the temple, Lemaire was able to combine panegyric of his patrons with advertisement of his own talents and to promote an ideology of the self-conscious and self-confident writer that was to characterize the stance of Ronsard and the Pleiade in the poet-architect debate of the later sixteenth century.
The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work. This project attempts to discover the ways in which diagrams accompanying the text and its commentaries show trends in the development of the kabbalistic tradition as a whole.
Die Bibliotheca Teubneriana, gegrundet 1849, ist die weltweit alteste, traditionsreichste und umfangreichste Editionsreihe griechischer und lateinischer Literatur von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit. Pro Jahr erscheinen 4-5 neue Editionen. Samtliche Ausgaben werden durch eine lateinische oder englische Praefatio erganzt. Die wissenschaftliche Betreuung der Reihe obliegt einem Team anerkannter Philologen: Gian Biagio Conte (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) Marcus Deufert (Universitat Leipzig) James Diggle (University of Cambridge) Donald J. Mastronarde (University of California, Berkeley) Franco Montanari (Universita di Genova) Heinz-Gunther Nesselrath (Georg-August-Universitat Goettingen) Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford) Oliver Primavesi (Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen) Michael D. Reeve (University of Cambridge) Richard J. Tarrant (Harvard University) Vergriffene Titel werden als Print-on-Demand-Nachdrucke wieder verfugbar gemacht. Zudem werden alle Neuerscheinungen der Bibliotheca Teubneriana parallel zur gedruckten Ausgabe auch als eBook angeboten. Die alteren Bande werden sukzessive ebenfalls als eBook bereitgestellt. Falls Sie einen vergriffenen Titel bestellen moechten, der noch nicht als Print-on-Demand angeboten wird, schreiben Sie uns an: [email protected] Samtliche in der Bibliotheca Teubneriana erschienenen Editionen lateinischer Texte sind in der Datenbank BTL Online elektronisch verfugbar.
This book contains a new edition and English translation of the oldest commentary on Aristotle written in Arabic and preserved to this day, together with an extensive commentary. It is a compendium on the treatise De generatione et corruptione, written by the Imamite theologian and heresiographer Hasan b. Musa al-Nawbakhti (fl. ca. 900). To this day, apart from the title of more than forty works and numerous fragments-taken mainly from his magnum opus, the Book of the Doctrines and Religions (Kitab al-ara' wa-al-diyanat)-only a single treatise of his, the Book of Shi'i Sects (Kitab firaq al-shi'a), was known to us. The text sheds new light in several ways: firstly, on the the Arabic philosophical tradition, since it was composed during the obscure period between al-Kindi and al-Farabi (roughly, the 2nd half of the 9th c.); secondly, on the Greek tradition, since the author makes extensive use of Alexander's lost commentary on De generatione; thirdly, on the formative period of shi'ism, since it helps us to reconstruct how the author borrowed from the Aristotelian tradition the tools necessary to build up a new anthropology compatible with the doctrine of the Occultation which he inaugurated at the time.
A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity, a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the title indicates, the volume considers both how ancient people lived in their cities as physical structures and how they thought with them as ideas and symbols. Essays in this volume deal with texts and sites from Spain to South India, but there is a particular focus on the archaeology and epigraphy of Roman-era Italy, civic identity in the Roman provinces, the Hebrew Bible and Early Christian literature, Vergil and other imperial Latin authors.
Tacitus, writing early in the second century AD, is acknowledged to be ancient Rome's greatest historian; his Annals, describing the emperors from Tiberius to Nero (AD 14 - 68), is his greatest work. This book gathers together Professor Woodman's writings on Tacitus over the past twenty-five years, focusing almost exclusively on the AnnalsR. He starts from, and argues for, the basic premiss that, as a historian, Tacitus must be seen in ancient rather than in modern terms. The Annals is a literary text of immense subtlety and acknowledged difficulty and complexity; it is also a very familiar text, read and reread by generations of scholars who want to find out about the Roman empire. One of Professor Woodman's principal contentions is that, through familiarity, these readers have misread significant passages of the text, thereby gaining and perpetuating a distorted view of what Tacitus has to say, especially about Tiberius. This distorted view is revealed, and the true meaning disclosed, by minute and detailed literary analysis. The author offers radically new or different interpretations of some of the most famous passages: the murder of Agrippa Postumus, the notorious accession debate of Tiberius, Tacitus' statement of the so-called `highest function of history', Tiberius' obituary, Nero's debauched water-borne party, and the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero in AD 65. There is also discussion of major narrative sections of Books 1 and 4, concentrating on such matters as structure, vivid representation, imitation and allusion, and dramatic and generic manipulation of the narrative. The new interpretations have profound implications for those who wish to use Tacitus' Annals as a source for what happened in the first century AD. |
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