The Poetics of Late Latin Literature
Jas' Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato
Abstract
The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found, not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman Empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Graeco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element—the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship ... More
The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found, not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman Empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Graeco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element—the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic, and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. This book attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A number of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry, as well as some of the most promising new scholars, have been specially commissioned to write original material for this volume.
Keywords:
cultural change,
early Christian literature,
intertextuality,
late antique Latin literature,
late antique studies,
literary aesthetics,
literary theory,
metaliterary twist,
poetics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199355631 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199355631.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jas' Elsner, editor
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Author Webpage
Jesús Hernández Lobato, editor
University of Salamanca, Spain
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