Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Ancient and Classical

Simone Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is one of her most celebrated works--an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost. First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil's whose work similarly...

In the wake of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," poets of the seventh and sixth centuries BC composed epics which covered other parts of the Trojan War story or different areas of Greek mythology. Quotations from them and other testimonies as to their content survive in later authors and the evidence thus assembled allows us to reconstruct something of the poems' contents. Collectively these poems came to be known by Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria as 'The Epic Cycle'. With their often grotesque and fantastic tales, the cyclic poems were an important source for later writers of epic. Yet...

This is a literary explication to the Odyssey. The book includes a chronology, extensive notes, and suggestions for further reading.

Starting from the conviction that Latin literature gains from being viewed as performance, the author sees the creation of different characters or "masks" in Latin literature as a result of the Greco-Roman training in rhetoric. She treats the texts of Roman satire as drama and focuses on the characters whose voices are heared in these performances: the angry satirist, the mocking satirist and the smiling satirist. She goes on to explore the implications of the use of these "masks" for authors and audiences of satire.

The
first book of Tacitus' Annals is concerned with the reign of Tiberius and
with Roman campaigns in Germany. Norma Miller's useful edition, first
published in the Methuen Classics series (1959), then by Bradda Books, by
Blackwell and finally by BCP (1992), remains one of the best approaches for
students making their first acquaintance with the work of Tacitus. The
generously full introduction has sections on the author and his work and the
content of Book I; most useful for the tiro are the sections on Tacitus'
individualities of style and of syntax. There...

The remains of classical literature contain a good deal of scattered literary theory, however difficult it may be to divine a consistent view among the conflicting interests of scholars, moralists and teachers of rhetoric. This book attempts to analyze the main themes against their historical background. It discusses ancient beliefs and theories relating to inspiration, the poet's message, imitation, the rhetorical approach to literature, classification of literary genres and the ancient sense of literary history. Aristotle, the Alexandrians, Longinus, Horace and other ancient critics have...

Lucretius offers his readers a complete guide to happiness and a total tour of the universe. Even a few selections from his poetry reveal the radical freethinker at his very best. This book draws on the latest research into the text and interpretation of Lucretius. It is aimed at the sixth-former or undergraduate who seeks a helpful introduction to the poem; little background knowledge of Latin literature will be assumed. The commentary elucidates both the poetic artistry and philosophical content.

This volume, published in 1968, was the first critical study of Persius in English. This new edition offers a close reading within the framework of criticism which led classics in the 1960s. Cynthia Dessen emphasizes the distinction between persona and poet and argues that Persius's satires, far from being "difficult" are unified and comprehensible through their controlling metaphors, their dominant imagery and word-repetition.

First published in the outstanding and long-running 'red Macmillan' series in 1947 and substantially updated in 1959 (with, for example, sections on the relationship between Homer and the Mycenaean world), Stanford's Odyssey - of which this is the first of two volumes - has remained the standard edition used in upper school and by university students to guide their early reading of Homer. A substantial introduction covers many of the questions that lie behind the poem, including a thorough summary of Homeric grammar; the text is elucidated with full annotations, indexes and...

The "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius (?97-55 BC) is at first sight something of an oddity: a scientific treatise dealing with atomic physics, human biology and the nature of the cosmos, it is at the same time a poem of great power and intensity, one of the most important and influential literary works of its era. This book seeks to resolve the apparent contradiction by locating Lucretius' poem in the context of a very ancient tradition of didactic (or 'teaching') epic. It explores some of the ways in which Lucretius, in this attempt to convince the reader of the truth of his philosophical...