Classical Literary Careers and their Reception

A wide-ranging study by leading experts focusing on the careers of Virgil, Horace and Ovid and the responses they provoked.

Philip Hardie (Edited by), Helen Moore (Edited by)

9780521762977, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 October 2010

344 pages, 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

'This volume fruitfully applies to aspects of Latin literature and its reception the goals and techniques of 'career criticism', that emergent branch of literary study which asks how a writer's oeuvre shapes or perceives itself as a totality, be it prospectively, concurrently or in retrospect, and whether in relation to its own internal stages of development or in relation to the extra textual circumstances of its production … a welcome, and very significant, expansion of career studies as a method for Roman literary history, not least because it will doubtless provoke further research in this rich area.' Gareth Williams, The Classical Review

This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman literary careers and their reception in later European literature, with contributions by leading experts. Starting from the three major Roman models for constructing a literary career - Virgil (the rota Vergiliana), Horace and Ovid - the volume then looks at alternative and counter-models in antiquity: Propertius, Juvenal, Cicero and Pliny. A range of post-antique responses to the ancient patterns is examined, from Dante to Wordsworth, and including Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Goethe. These chapters pose the question of the continuing relevance of ancient career models as ideas of authorship change over the centuries, leading to varying engagements and disengagements with classical literary careers. The volume also considers other ways of concluding or extending a literary career, such as bookburning and figurative metempsychosis.

Introduction. Literary careers: classical models and their receptions Philip Hardie and Helen Moore
1. Some Virgilian unities Michael C. J. Putnam
2. There and back again: Horace's poetic career Stephen Harrison
3. The Ovidian career model: Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie
4. An elegist's career: from Cynthia to Cornelia S. J. Heyworth
5. Persona and satiric career in Juvenal Catherine Keane
6. The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel
7. Re-inventing Virgil's wheel: the poet and his work from Dante to Petrarch Andrew Laird
8. Did Shakespeare have a literary career? Patrick Cheney
9. New spins on old rotas: Virgil, Ovid, Milton Maggie Kilgour
10. Bookburning and the poetic deathbed: the legacy of Virgil Nita Krevans
11. Literary afterlives: metempsychosis from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges Stuart Gillespie
12. 'Mirrored doubles': Andrew Marvell, the remaking of poetry and the poet's career Nigel Smith
13. Dryden and the complete career Raphael Lyne
14. Goethe's elegiac sabbatical Joseph Farrell
15. Wordsworth's career prospects: 'peculiar language' and public epigraphs Nicola Trott
16. Epilogue. Inventing a life: a personal view of literary careers Lawrence Lipking.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]