by Kirby Flower Smith (1978)
This is the first full and detailed commentary on the second book of Tibullus' elegies since K. F. Smith's edition of 1913. It takes into account every significant advance in scholarship since then both on Tibullus and elegy in general. The book provides an authoritative Latin text, based on the definitive Oxford Classical Text; an introduction covering such topics as the chronology of Book II, its completeness and construction, and the main characters of the poems; and a comprehensive commentary discussing all aspects of linguistic and literary interest in the poems: the problems of reference and interpretation, for instance, as well diction, style, themes, and metre. There are also introductory essays on each poem, discussing the background situation, genre, and main models. A critical appendix looks at all the textual points that substantially affect the understanding and appreciation of the elegies, a structural appendix explores the structure of the individual poems, and there are full indices.
Jahan Ramazani
Poetry is often regarded as being 'stubbornly national', with little influence outwith the country in which it is written. In this book however, the author reveals many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary pardigms.
Paul Keen
"Paul Keen explores how a consumer revolution which reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century shaped debates about the role of literature in a polite modern nation, and tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to these pressures. From dream reveries which mocked their own entrepreneurial commitments, such as Oliver Goldsmith's account of selling his work at a 'Fashion Fair' on the frozen Thames, to the Microcosm's mock plan to establish 'a licensed warehouse for wit,' writers insistently tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated understanding of the uncertain complexities of a modern transnational society. This book combines a new understanding of late eighteenth-century literature with the materialist and sociological imperatives of book history and theoretically inflected approaches to cultural history"--
Elena Russo
This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal experience and public expression, an inability that confines them to various forms of solipsism. Russo contends that such Empiricist notions still inform contemporary French novels and criticism. She deftly shows that current forms of linguistic skepticism favored by Blanchot, Sartre, Barthes, and Derrida are in fact the very product of the Empiricist notion of truth these authors claim to have rejected. Instead, she argues for the social and contextual dimension of language and against the illusion of authenticity on which these critics still rely. Her readings recast the debates surrounding postmodernism by placing them in a much-needed historical context. Through a series of lively close readings of Prevost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Constant's Adolphe, and Des Forets's Le Bavard, Russo establishes the continuous legacy of Empiricism across three centuries. Prevost pins his narrator's interpretive difficulties on an inability to know and categorize Oriental reality, Constant grounds his critique of language on the same ethical and political principles that underlie his liberalism, while Des Forets's extreme solipsism pitches him against the Sartrean notion of engagement.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
This book explores the appropriation and transformation of classical mythology by French culture from the mid-twelfth century to about 1430. Each of the five chapters focuses on a specific moment in this process and asks: What were the purposes of transforming classical myth? Which techniques did poets use to integrate classical subject matter into their own texts? Was a special interpretive tradition created for vernacular texts?