The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage
for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the
swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was
incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet
from Catullus to Ovid, "Subjecting Verses" presents the first
comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's.
Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry
with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault,
Lacan, and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies
of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining
whether particular themes and poets were pro- or
anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks
two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions
were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline?
Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental
split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first
century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place
at the time.
"Subjecting Verses" is a major interpretive feat whose influence
will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise
of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a
rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory
that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor
examines them in a vacuum.
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