Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature
Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature
Lecturer in Comparative Literature
Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford; Fellow and Tutor in Classics
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Abstract
This volume investigates an important and widespread strategy in Latin literature which has to date received little sustained discussion: the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who in fact hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position. Itself widely associated with the markers of imperial hegemony and elite speech, Latin literature comprises a broad range of phenomena that involve the strategic adoption of a markedly disempowered voice: topoi such as recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in status-conforming, superior genres) and rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia (artfully and strategically adopting a persona to garner favour, even when this means temporarily forfeiting one’s higher status and discursive privileges); works, such as Ovid’s Heroides with its long-silenced female heroines, and entire genres, such as satire with its irreverent take on the great and the good generically framed as articulated ‘from below’; and even large-scale cultural self-positionings such as expressions of Roman cultural inferiority vis-à-vis classical Greece or the tensions that arise between humble (yet spiritually superior) Christian writers and their grand, canonical, and classical (yet pagan) predecessors. This volume is dedicated to the literary and cultural-political possibilities opened up by assuming and speaking in voices of weakness and inferiority. It demonstrates that re-negotiating alleged weakness constitutes a central activity in Latin literature and plays a crucial role in establishing, perpetuating, and challenging hierarchies and values in a wide range of fields: from poetics and choices of genre to social status and intra- and intercultural relations.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: Latin Literature’s Complex Inferiorities
Sebastian Matzner
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1
Claiming Inferiority: Weakness into Strength
William Fitzgerald
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2
How Do You Solve a Problem like Horace? On Roman Philhellenism and Post-Colonial Critique
Sebastian Matzner
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3
Blackface and Drag in the Palliata
Amy Richlin
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4
Social Inferiority and Poetic Inferiority—Martial’s Revenge in his Epigrams: A Commentary on Martial 5.13
Jean-Claude Julhe
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5
Drawing Blanks: The Pale Shades of ‘Phaedrus’ and ‘Juvenal’
Tom Geue
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6
The Creative Superiority of Self-Reproach: Horace’s Ars Poetica
Victoria Rimell
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7
‘The Noise, and the People’: Popular clamor and Political Discourse in Latin Historiography
Ellen O’Gorman
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8
Loud and Proud: The Voice of the praeco in Roman Love Elegy
Dunstan Lowe
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9
Hidden Voices: Homoerotic Colour in Horace’s Odes
Stephen Harrison
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10
On Not Being Beautiful
G. O. Hutchinson
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11
From Adultery to Incest: Messalina and Agrippina as Sexual Aggressors in Tacitus’ Annals
Vassiliki Panoussi
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12
The Aeneid as ‘Weaker Text’ and Fulgentius’ Radical Hermeneutics
Shadi Bartsch
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13
Cowherds and Saints: Paulinus of Nola Carmen 18
Philip Hardie
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End Matter
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