Gathering together over 60 new and revised discussions of textual issues, this volume represents notorious problems in well-known texts from the classical era by authors including Horace, Ennius, and Vergil. A follow-up to Vegiliana: Critical Studies on the Texts of Publius Vergilius Maro (2017), the volume includes major contributions to the discussion of Horace's Carmen IV 8 and IV 12, along with studies on Catullus Carmen 67 and Hadrian's Animula vagula, as well as a new contribution on Livy's text at IV 20 in connection with Cossus's spolia opima, and on Vergil's Aeneid 3. 147-152 and 11. 151-153. On Ennius, the author presents several new ideas on Ann. 42 Sk. and 220-22l, and in editing Horace, he suggests new principles for the critical apparatus and tries to find a balance by weighing both sides in several studies, comparing a conservative and a radical approach. Critica will be an important resource for students and scholars of Latin language and literature.

This book offers a new English translation of Musaeus' poem Hero and Leander, with the original Greek on the facing page, a substantial introduction and a detailed commentary. The tragic romance of Hero and Leander has had and still has a great appeal, inspiring countless writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians. The Introduction aims at situating the poem within its literary tradition and cultural context as well as at drawing its major themes and describing the salient features of its style. Because Hero and Leander enjoyed an immense and uninterrupted popularity, the Introduction also devotes a large section to the poem's reception in literature, which crosses paths with the reception of the other main ancient poetic treatment of the legend, Ovid's Heroides 18 and 19. The commentary, which follows the Greek text and its translation, is addressed to a variety of readers: the student and the scholar of Greek literature, as well as those of other literatures in which the poem has been inspirational. This work has no precedent in the English language. This new translation will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek and late antique literature, as well as those working on mythology and classical reception.

Trevisa's encyclopaedia, the first to appear in English, enshrines many basic medieval ideas which are reflected in English literature well into the seventeenth century.;The two-volume text of Trevisa's translation "On the Properties of Things", published in 1975, quickly established itself as a reference work for scholars working in many disciplines on the late Middle Ages. This third volume, comprising introduction, commentary, and glossary, offers a useful tool for understanding the printed text and the manuscripts on which it is based.;Historians of the Middle Ages, and all those interested in medieval literature should find this book of great interest.

Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar is a prime source of information about people and affairs in Iceland from the 1180s to 1217, the beginning of the Sturlung Age, and the great period of creativity in Icelandic saga-writing. The first critical edition based on all the manuscripts currently available, the saga offers insightful information about daily life, seafaring, law, feud, medicine, superstition, and "sacramental" and "secular" attitudes. The volume is furnished with full textual notes, a detailed introduction, and a substantial commentary that clarifies points of content, language, and style.

In its first edition, this book was a new opening in the study of the Arabian Nights as an index of literary taste, a case study for the engagements of poets and writers, along with the common reading public, with an art that took Europe by surprise, and forced new patterns of response and writing. Borges thought of its advent as a dynamic that helped generate the romantic mode and sensibility. It certainly disturbed old habits of thought and made significant cultural inroads throughout European cultures. Almost no one in 18th-19th century literatures remained oblivious to that sweeping phenomenal appearance. The book analyzes and studies modes and patterns of reading, response, engagement, commentary, translations, claims to authentication, abridgements, and illustrations. It focuses on debates and controversies around the Arabian Nights, and shows how these happened to be at the center of a growing colonial culture. This book can never lose its significance for students, scholars, and general readership, not only in the field of comparative and cultural studies, English and French departments, but also in postcolonial studies and the basics of narrative and narratology.

"Murderous Mothers is both an homage to and a critical reflection on the multiple Medea figures that populate late twentieth-century German literature. Claire Scott artfully demonstrates how feminist politics and women's issues - from abstract questions about the power of women's bodies and voices, to concrete matters like abortion and sexual violence - speak through this ancient myth, transforming it into something vital and urgent. Scott's own voice is crystal clear throughout, which allows the layers of productive critique to shine through. With its sophisticated literary analyses, its deep engagement with feminist and postcolonial theory, and its lucid and accessible style, Murderous Mothers will interest and provoke a range of readers and critics." (Kata Gellen, Duke University) "Murderous Mothers explores the ambiguities of literary Medea adaptations in beautifully written, engaging prose. For anyone interested in the aesthetics and politics of contemporary literature, this book offers brilliant examples of how literary adaptations of classical myths can contribute to contemporary political discourses on motherhood, reproductive rights, gender, and rage." (Maria Stehle, University of Tennessee, Knoxville) This book explores German-language Medea adaptations from the late twentieth century and their relationship to feminist theory and politics. Close readings of novels and plays by Ursula Haas, Christa Wolf, Dagmar Nick, Dea Loher, and Elfriede Jelinek reveal the promise and the pitfalls of using gendered depictions of violence to process inequity and oppression. The figure of Medea has been called many things: a witch, a barbarian, a monster, a goddess, a feminist heroine, a healer, and, finally, a murderous mother. This book considers Medea in all her complexity, thereby reframing our understanding of identity as it relates to feminism and to mythological storytelling. This book project was the Joint Winner of the 2020 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition for German Studies in America.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a « boom in the production, publication, readership, and scholarship of women's writing from Latin America. In fact, the emergence of women writers is perhaps the most significant phenomenon of the « post-boom« period of Latin American literary history, a phenomenon that has been influenced in turn by the burgeoning development of a number of women's movements on the continent. Within this « boom« , the short story has become an increasingly popular genre amongst women writers. This book considers the location(s) of four major women writers - Cristina Peri Rossi, Rosario Ferre, Albalucia Angel, and Isabel Allende - and their short fiction within these changing literary and social contexts. Combining close textual analysis of their fiction with a consideration of the social, historical, and geographical contexts of literary production, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in Latin American studies, women's studies, and comparative literature.

Combining the studies of modern film, traditional narratology, and Roman art, this interdisciplinary work explores the complex and highly visual techniques of Tacitus' Annales. The volume opens with a discussion of current research in narratology, as applied to Roman historians. Narratology is a helpful and insightful tool, but is often inadequate to deal with specifically visual aspects of ancient narrative. In order to illuminate Tacitus' techniques, and to make them speak to modern readers, this book focuses on drawing and illustrating parallels between Tacitus' historiographical methods and modern film effects. Building on these premises, Waddell examines a wide array of Tacitus' visual narrative devices. Tacitean examples are discussed in light of their narrative effect and purpose in the Annales, as well as the ways in which they are similar to contemporary Roman art and modern film techniques, including focalization, alignment, use of the ambiguous gaze, temporal suggestion and quick-cutting. Through this approach the modern scholar gains a deeper understanding of the many ways in which Tacitus' Annales act upon the reader, and how his narrative technique helps to shape, guide, and deeply layer his history.

Euripides' Ion is a highly complex and elusive play and thus poses considerable difficulties to any interpreter. On the basis of a new recension of the text, this commentary offers explanations of the language, literary technique, and realia of the play and discusses the main issues of interpretation. In this way the reader is provided with the material required for an appreciation of this entertaining as well as provocative dramatic composition.

Ovid's remarkable and endlessly fascinating Metamorphoses is one of the best-known and most popular works of classical literature, exerting a pervasive influence on later European literature and culture. A vast repository of mythic material as well as a sophisticated manipulation of story-telling, the poem can be appreciated on many different levels and by audiences of very different backgrounds and educational experiences. As the poem's focus on transformation and transgression connects in many ways with contemporary culture and society, modern research perspectives have developed correspondingly. Metamorphic Readings presents the state of the art in research on this canonical Roman epic. Written in an accessible style, the essays included represent a variety of approaches, exploring the effects of transformation and the transgression of borders. The contributors investigate three main themes: transformations into the Metamorphoses (how the mythic narratives evolved), transformations in the Metamorphoses (what new understandings of the dynamics of metamorphosis might be achieved), and transformations of the Metamorphoses (how the Metamorphoses were later understood and came to acquire new meanings). The many forms of transformation exhibited by Ovid's masterpiece are explored-including the transformation of the genre of mythic narrative itself.

This book presents a critical edition of a collection of liturgical manuscripts that the Augustinian friar Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568) assembled in the 1560s for the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as well as for Hans Jakob Fugger in Augsburg. Onofrio Panvinio is primarily known for his antiquarian studies about ancient Rome and for his edition of Bartolomeo Platina's Lives of the Popes. His preoccupation with the Roman rite, however, remains until today largely unnoticed by modern scholarship. This edition of Panvinio's Vetusti aliquot rituales libri highlights his interests in the development of Roman liturgy during the last sessions of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) by presenting the various documentary as well as cultural layers of Panvinio's collection of Roman ritual manuscripts.

Aristophanes' Wasps (422 B.C.) is an entertaining comedy that plunges us into the life of a family in classical Athens, while treating themes that readers of any time and place can appreciate. A father and son argue about politics, household servants try to please their master, a disruptive gang of the father's friends decide to intervene, a dog becomes a lightning-rod for his antics in the kitchen, attempts are made at reform and reconciliation, and it all ends with a drinking party that goes disastrously wrong. The father, Philocleon, and his friends, the chorus of wasp-like old men for whom the play is named, are some of the great creations of comic drama. The characters of the Wasps make constant references to the everyday world they are living in: its political demagogues, court system, religious rituals, social niceties, class distinctions, diseases, clothes, food, toilets, paychecks, geography, weather, household items, literary and mythological allusions, military experiences, and much more. These references give the play its immediacy, but their unfamiliarity to modern students can pose a challenge. This edition provides a full introduction devoted to the political, social, and literary background of the play, as well as notes to the text explaining historical details.

The post-classical compilation known to modern scholarship as the Latin Anthology contains a collection of a hundred riddles, each consisting of three hexameters and preceded by a lemma. It would seem from the preface to this collection that they were composed extempore at a dinner to celebrate the Roman Saturnalia. The work was to have a defining influence on later collections of riddles; yet its title (probably the Aenigmata) has been debated, and almost nothing is known about its author: questions have even been asked about his name (Symphosius?) and date (4th-5th centuruy AD?). In this edition of the riddles, the Introducion discusses the work's title and its author's identity: as well as his name and date, it considers his national origin (North African?) and intellectual background (a professional grammarian?), and argues that he was not Christian, as has been suggested. It examines the Saturnalian background to the work, setting it in its sociological context, and discusses the author's literary debts - especially to Martial. The Introduction also explores the author's ordering and arrangement of the riddles, discusses his literary style, Latinity and metre, and comments briefly on his Nachleben. It concludes with a survey of the textual tradition. The commentary on each riddle includes a translation, general notes on the object it describes (with reference, as necessary, to museums and artefacts), and discussion of how it fits into the ordering of the collection, of variant readings and, with suitable illustration, of literary, stylistic and metrical considerations. Other areas, such as history and mythology, are also covered where relevant.

An edition with facing annotated translation of the twelfth-century Medieval French popular romance Guillaume d'Angleterre. The claim to fame of this verse narrative is to have had its authorship attributed (falsely) to Chretien de Troyes, the most famous of all twelfth-century Medieval French narrative poets. This prototypical adventure romance and is representative of a literary genre that has recently seen a renewal of interest among medieval literary critics. An amusing tale of late twelfth-century social mobility, the romance tells of a bewildering series of adventures that befall a fictitious king who deliberately abandons his royal status to enter the 'real' world of knights, wolves, pirates and merchants. He and his family, dispersed by events between Bristol, Galway and Caithness, are finally reunited at Yarmouth thanks to a climactic stag hunt. The book is designed for students of French, Medieval Studies, Comparative Literature and English, and for all medieval scholars interested in having an English version of a typical medieval adventure romance. It is the first authoritative English translation of this text, and all of its critical material is new. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/TXVU9029

James Bradley Wells shares his poet's soul and scholar's eye in this thought-provoking new translation of two of Vergil's early works, the Eclogues and Georgics. With its emphasis on a natural rather than stylized rhythm, Eclogues and Georgics honors the original spirit of ancient Roman poetry as both a written and performance-based art form. The accompanying introductory essays situate both sets of poems in a rich literary tradition. Wells provides historical context and literary analysis of these two works, eschewing facile interpretations of these oft examined texts and ensconcing them in the society and culture from which they originated. The translations in Eclogues and Georgics are augmented with annotated essays, a pronunciation guide, and a glossary. These supplementary materials, alongside Wells's bold vision for what translation choices can reveal, promote radically democratizing access for readers with an interest in classics or poetry.

This book addresses a rich corpus of contemporary narratives by authors who have come to Italy as migrants. It traces the figurative commonalities that emerge across these diverse texts, which together suggest the shape and substance of what might be termed 'migrant imaginaries'. Examining five central figures and concepts - identity, memory, home, place and space, and literature - across a range of novels and stories by writers of African and Middle Eastern origin, the study elucidates the affective and expressive processes that inflect migrant story-telling. Drawing on the work of cultural theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Michel de Certeau, as well as on recent work in postcolonial literary studies, memory studies, human geography and feminist theory, the book probes the varied works of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Amara Lakhous, Mohsen Melliti, Younis Tawfik and many others. Each chapter posits alternative interpretations of the ways in which the interior experience of encounters across territories, cultures and languages is figured in this literature. In doing so, the book moves towards a wider apprehension of recent Italian migration narratives as suggestions of what a new notion of contemporary 'Italian' literature might look like, figured at once within and beyond the boundaries of a national literature, a national language and a national cultural imaginary.

This book systematically depicts the theory of textual patterns (chengshi) of the eight-part essays and logic in ancient Chinese texts. With the rare materials, it covers all the basic and important aspects of the whole process and values of chengshi, such as the transformation of different parts and the coherent expression of the doctrines, the planning of writing, and the application to the aesthetic and pedagogic fields. It also explores the similarities and disparities of logical patterns between ancient Chinese and Western texts. Though entirely fresh and tentative, the contrastive studies get new insights into the logic and philosophical concepts hidden in the writings for better understanding of the uniqueness and richness implied in Chinese culture.

Published in 1991 The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda is a late Elizabethan romantic tragedy by Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy. It dramatises the triangular relationship of the Turkish emperor Soliman, his captive Perseda and her beloved Erastus against the fictionalised backdrop of the Turkish invasion of Rhodes in the early sixteenth century. This volume contains the original text along with textual and critical notes.

Akhnaton, a pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, is about to challenge everything his people and culture hold dear in The Last Pharaoh. Before his rule, Egyptians lived a life of slavery under their rulers, who demanded abject submission. In a culture where rulers are revered as gods, change comes slowly, if at all. The pharaoh's grand vision of sweeping social reform is met with violent hostility by the priesthood and every other power player in the kingdom. When Akhnaton announces that he is, in fact, as mortal and fallible as his subjects, his proclamation inspires rivalries that would enthusiastically put his new mortality to the test. Neighbors struggle with questions of faith, morality, and the social order in Winter Dreams, a two-act play that could take place in any small town in America. When a child preacher stirs up old drama and rivalries, more questions than answers arise. Is he really the voice of God, or are other forces at work? The New Odyssey explores a darker future for humanity. In 1999-as the flames of the disastrous Third World War cool, and the fourth apocalyptic global war looms-a college professor summons Hesiod, Homer, and Shakespeare. He argues passionately to enlist their help in a bold plan to save humanity from its eventual destruction-at the hand of womankind. If he can get these three minds from humanity's past in on his scheme, there may be hope for mankind's future yet.

Italian children's literature has a diverse and unusual tradition of fantasy. With the exception of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, however, it has remained almost entirely unknown outside of Italy. Why is it that Italian children's fantasy has remained such a well-kept secret? How 'international' is the term 'fantasy', and to what extent has its development been influenced by local as well as global factors? Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into this neglected area is essential if we are to enrich our understanding of this important literary genre. This book charts the history and evolution of Italian children's fantasy, from its first appearance in the 1870s to the present day. It traces the structural and thematic progression of the genre in Italy and situates this development against the changing backdrop of Italian culture, society and politics. The author argues that ever since the foundation of Italy as a nation-state the Italian people have been actively involved in an ongoing process of identity formation and that the development of children's fantasy texts has been inextricably intertwined with sociopolitical and cultural imperatives.