The Origin Of Latin Love Elegy

Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an accessible introduction for the general reader interested in Latin love elegy and the history of love and lament in Western literature, as well as a collection of critically stimulating essays for students and scholars of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.

This book offers a representative selection of the three main exponents of Latin love elegy: Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. A few elegiac poems by Catullus are included for purposes of comparison. The book includes a general introduction to the elegy, select bibliography, Latin text of twenty poems, and commentary to introduce each poem, notes, both grammatical and to aid literary analysis.

The five chapters that make up this short book examine the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. Each study is centred around a reading of a poem or poems together with a discussion of a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches drawn from modern scholars and theorists such as Paul Veyne, Roland Barthes an Michel Foucault. In each case, the modes of analysis involved are pressed hard to see where they may lead, and, equally, where they may show signs of strain. All Latin texts and terms are translated or closely paraphrased.

The Versus Eporedienses (Verses from Ivrea), written around the year 1080 and attributed to a certain Wido, is a highly fascinating elegiac love poem celebrating worldly pleasures in an age usually associated with contemptus mundi. One of the poem's intriguing features, its extensive use of the Latin classics, especially of Ovid, makes it a precursor of the poetry of the so-called twelfth-century renaissance. In this first book-length study of the poem, the author provides a historical contextualisation, a verse-by-verse commentary, a detailed analysis of the classical sources and a discussion of its similarities with contemporary and later medieval poetry.

A Companion to Roman Love Elegy is the first comprehensive work dedicated solely to the study of love elegy. The genre is explored through 33 original essays thatoffer new and innovative approaches to specific elegists and the discipline as a whole. Contributors represent a range of established names and younger scholars, all of whom are respected experts in their fields Contains original, never before published essays, which are both accessible to a wide audience and offer a new approach to the love elegists and their work Includes 33 essays on the Roman elegists Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Sulpicia, and Ovid, as well as their Greek and Roman predecessors and later writers who were influenced by their work Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in Roman elegy from scholars who have used a variety of critical approaches to open up new avenues of understanding

This volume sheds new light on the extraordinary richness and variety of love poetry written in Latin from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. It shows how Latin love poets reworked classical Roman and Greek models, and engaged in dialogue with mediaeval and contemporary vernacular traditions of poetry. They used the poetic language of love in Latin to reflect and comment on wider social, ethical and literary issues, and reconfigured its codes of representation in response to changing conceptions of love in the philosophical and religious spheres. Their poetry often aligned itself with dominant discourses of power and gender, but it could also be subtly subversive or even openly transgressive.