The Virgilian centos anticipate the avant-garde and smash the image of
a staid, sober, and centered classical world. This book examines the
twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos that survive from
antiquity. The centos, in which authors take non-consecutive lines or
segments of lines from the _Eclogues_, _Georgics_, and _Aeneid_ and
reconnect them to produce new poems, have received limited attention.
No other book-length study exists of all the centos, which date from
ca. 200 to ca. 530.The centos are literary games, and they have a
playful shock value that feels very modern. Yet the texts also demand
to be taken seriously for what they disclose about late antique
literary culture, Virgil's reception, and several important topics in
Latin literature and literary studies generally. As radically
intertextual works, the centos are particularly valuable sites for
pursuing inquiry into allusion. Scrutinizing the peculiarities of the
texts' allusive engagements with Virgil requires clarification of the
roles of the author and the reader in allusion, the criteria for
determining what constitutes an allusion, and the different functions
allusion can have. By investigating the centos from these different
perspectives and asking what they reveal about a wide range of weighty
subjects, this book comes into dialogue with major topics and studies
in Latin literature.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780190291884
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter