Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority

This advanced introduction to Horace examines his poetry as works of literature and important social acts.

Ellen Oliensis (Author)

9780521573153, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 May 1998

256 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

'… a dense and elegant book, whose subtle reading of individual poems are deployed in a compelling account of Horace's oeuvre as a search for poetic and social authority.' The Times Literary Supplement

This book explores how Horace's poems construct the literary and social authority of their author. Bridging the traditional distinction between 'persona' and 'author', Ellen Oliensis considers Horace's poetry as one dimension of his 'face' - the projected self-image that is the basic currency of social interactions. She reads Horace's poems not only as works of art but also as social acts of face-saving, face-making and self-effacement. These acts are responsive, she suggests, to the pressure of several audiences: Horace shapes his poetry to promote his authority and to pay deference to his patrons while taking account of the envy of contemporaries and the judgement of posterity. Drawing on the insights of sociolinguistics, deconstruction and new historicism Dr Oliensis charts the poet's shifting strategies of authority and deference across his entire literary career.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Face-saving and self-defacement in the Satires
2. Making faces at the mirror: the Epodes and the civil war
3. Acts of enclosure: the ideology of form in the Odes
4. Overreading the Epistles
5. The art of self-fashioning in the Ars poetica
Postscript: Odes 4.3
Works cited
Poems discussed
General index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]