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.
By:
Paul Allen Miller
Imprint: Princeton University Pres
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 26mm
Weight: 595g
ISBN: 9780691096742
ISBN 10: 0691096740
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 02 February 2004
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
"ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix CHAPTER ONE Toward a New History of Genre:Elegy and the Real 1 CHAPTER TWO The Catullan Sublime,Elegy, and the Emergence of the Real 31 CHAPTER THREE Cynthia as Symptom: Propertius, Gallus, and the Boys 60 CHAPTER FOUR ""He Do the Police in Different Voices"": The Tibullan Dream Text 95 CHAPTER FIVE Why Propertius Is a Woman 130 CHAPTER SIX Deconstructing the Vir: Lawand the Other in the Amores 160 CHAPTER SEVEN Displacing the Subject, Saving the Text 184 CHAPTER EIGHT Between the Two Deaths: Technologies of the Self in Ovid's Exilic Poetry 210 NOTES 237 BIBLIOGRAPHY 277 INDEX LOCORUM 303 GENERAL INDEX 307"
Paul Allen Miller is Director of Comparative Literature and Professor of Classics at the University of South Carolina. The author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness and Latin Erotic Elegy , he has edited ten volumes, including Rethinking Sexuality, (Princeton).
Reviews for Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real
""This work offers a panoramic analysis of a major literary genre, important for historic as well as aesthetic reasons, and of the scholarship produced on it over the past century. It applies a range of sophisticated contemporary theoretical perspectives to illuminate the genre as a whole and specific texts within it. Its close readings abound with new insights.""—Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park
