The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets

الغلاف الأمامي
Cornell University Press, 1986 - 215 من الصفحات

This collection of essays offer a unified and coherent argument and point toward an important new approach in classical philology that challenges the dominant trends in Anglo-American criticism of Latin literature, which emphasize the autonomy of isolated texts or make extensive use of historical or sociological analysis.

Gian Biagio Conte here seeks to establish a theoretical basis for explaining the ways in which Latin poets borrow from one another and echo one another. He stresses the systematic nature of literary discourse and its tendency to create systems of interrelated texts wherein each author's mode of assimilating and changing the tradition becomes a part of the tradition. Imitation, Conte asserts, should not be regarded merely as the inert confluence of historical circumstances but rather as a rhetorical figure in itself and indeed as one of the major rhetorical devices of classical Latin poetry.

The first half of the book establishes Conte's theoretical position; that position is then applied in detail to Virgil in the second half. Conte shows how Virgil, by contrasting bucolic and elegiac genres in Eclogue 10, effects a confrontation between different models of life. He discusses the Aeneid at length, demonstrating how Virgil modifies and transforms both Greek and Roman epic conventions. Virgil's ability to simultaneously maintain a plurality of points of view, Conte believes, made it possible for him to transcend the limits set by his predecessors and thereby to enrich the communicative and expressive range of the epic genre.

These suggestive essays address important issues in the field of classical literature and interpretive method. They will find an appreciative audience among classicists and their students, comparativists, literary theorists, and anyone else concerned with the application of contemporary critical and semiotic theory to literary texts."

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المحتوى

Foreword by Charles Segal 7 61
7
Abbreviations
19
Poetic Memory and the Art of Allusion
32
Its Historical and Systematic Features
40
PART TWO GENRE AND ITS BOUNDARIES
97
Aristaeus Orpheus and the Georgics
130
Toward an Interpretation
141
Cultural Models and Literary
185
Index
209
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طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

نبذة عن المؤلف (1986)

Gian Biagio Conte is Professor of Latin Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.

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