Latin love elegy’s flourishing concurrent with Rome’s transition from Republic to Principate has remained an issue central to scholarship on the genre since the turn of the last millennium. This book addresses the Greco-Roman literary inheritance and Augustan socio-political context that paved the way for that flourishing, while examining the genre’s key elements and characters as illustrated in the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and Sulpicia. Special attention is paid to the gendered dynamics that govern the relationship between “poet-lover” (amator) and beloved and to the role of the poet as artist and creator of a “written girl” (scripta puella).
Hunter H. Gardner (Ph.D. 2005, University of North Carolina) is a Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of numerous articles on Latin elegy, has co-edited two essay collections, and written two monographs, including Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (Oxford 2013).
Contents
Acknowledgments Abstract Keywords
Introduction
1 Antecedents, Origins, Innovations
2 Playing the Gender Card: Augustan Love Elegy
3 (De)constructing the puella
4 Elegiac vulnerabilities: scripting desire in Augustan Rome
5 Receptions and New Directions
Bibliography Index
Ideal for graduate students and advanced undergraduates encountering Latin love elegy for the first time. Also useful for general audiences interested in gender in the ancient Mediterranean and Greco-Roman poetry.