Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire

Aulus Gellius and the Imperial Prose Collection

Scott J. DiGiulio (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

344 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-768826-7 (ISBN)

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Most classists have viewed Aulus Gellius' second-century text, the Noctes Atticae, as little more than a haphazard collection of short essays and excerpts by an amateur scholar. Often called a "miscellany," the Noctes Atticae collects vast amounts of otherwise lost ancient literature and records Gellius' experience of reading them. While the depictions of his scholarly activity have led some scholars to see in Gellius a kindred spirit--a Classicist avant la lettre--his work is often relegated to the second tier of Latin literature, considered either an unoriginal assembly of more sophisticated sources or too heterogeneous for Classicists to approach as a whole.

Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire, on the other hand, interprets the Noctes Atticae as a fundamentally literary collection that offers a profound meditation on the experience of reading and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire. Incorporating textual analysis alongside narratology-informed approaches, Scott J. DiGiulio investigates the strategies used by Gellius to innovate within the Latin literary tradition and provides a framework for interpreting this text's perceived disorder on its own terms. The Noctes Atticae's self-conscious, miscellaneous aesthetic can enable us to probe the nature of reading during this moment in time, as Gellius' central preoccupation is articulating distinct "ways of reading," which DiGiulio argues we may use to navigate the web of literature in the Roman Empire. Gellius' use of material framing devices, focal characters, recurrent citations in dialogue with one another, and allusive references to other near-contemporary works can all be used as evidence that the evolution of prose as a literary form took place in the second century.

Scott DiGiulio is Associate Professor of Classics and Senior Research Associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University. He is the co-editor of Documentality: New Approaches to Documents in the Roman Empire.

Preface
Introduction: Ways of Reading and the Miscellanistic Project
Chapter 1: Reading the NA through the Latin Literary Past: Gellius and the Imperial Prose Tradition
Chapter 2: Approaching a Miscellanistic Work from the Outside In: Paratextual Strategies
Chapter 3: Prescribing a Way of Reading: Gellius' Preface as Critical Model
Chapter 4: Confronting Variety in the NA: A Guide for the Perplexed
Chapter 5: The Poetics of Prose: Gellius, Alexandrianism, and the Composed Book
Chapter 6: How to Read a Book: NA Book 3
Chapter 7: Approaches to Reading Miscellanistic Aesthetics from Late Antiquity to Today
References

Erscheinungsdatum	25.07.2024
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 226 mm
Gewicht	658 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-768826-8 / 0197688268
ISBN-13	978-0-19-768826-7 / 9780197688267
Zustand	Neuware