Ancient Roman Literary Gardens

Gender, Genre, and Geopoetics

K. Sara Myers (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

312 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-777320-8 (ISBN)

Lieferbar (Termin unbekannt)
Versandkostenfrei
Auch auf Rechnung

Artikel merken

Gardens are not central in Latin literature, but usually somewhere off to the side, as was often the real garden. They appear, however, in some form in nearly all literary genres of Latin literature--history, satire, epigrams, epics, letters, lyric poetry, elegies, and novels--and often edge their way into larger socio-economic and political discussions about Roman identity, gender, wealth, and land use. Through an analysis of ancient garden studies and close readings of major Latin texts from the first centuries BCE and CE, K. Sara Myers examines the function and representation of garden descriptions in the work of a broad range of Roman authors, such as Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Varro, Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Columella, Statius, and Pliny the Elder and Younger.

While most of the sources in this study are poetic and their gardens fictional, it is still important to situate these works in their cultural and historical contexts. By understanding how to interpret the importance of these spaces in the literature in which they appear, readers will not only better comprehend the aesthetic and ethical values of the work in question, but they will also gain a better insight into ancient Roman attitudes toward gender, art, and human relationships with nature. Myers shows how some Romans constructed the garden as a space under male control: Men are cultivators, while women are cultivated. Literary gardens can symbolize a range of positive masculine ideals and identities for elite men--from the rustic farmer to the philosopher--but can also represent unmanly luxury and leisure. Women in gardens are usually sexualized, depicted as virginal or sexually transgressive, especially when they attempt to express ownership over these spaces. In almost all these texts, the artificial and artistic arrangement of the raw material of nature invites self-reflexivity, which Myers calls "geopoetics," or a "poetics of the earth."

K. Sara Myers is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia and the author of Ovid's Causes and a commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses 14.

Introduction: Gardens, Gender, Genre, Geopoetics
Chapter 1: Masculine Horticultural Self-Fashioning: Hard and Soft Labor
Chapter 2: Vergil's Garden (Georgics 4.116-48): A Literary Paradigm
Chapter 3: Women in the Garden: Catullus, Ovid, and the Greek Poetic Tradition
Chapter 4: Trampling in the Garden: Satiric Verse and Epigram
Chapter 5: Columella and the Poetics of Horticulture
Conclusion and Epilogue

Erscheinungsdatum	04.08.2024
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	164 x 237 mm
Gewicht	599 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-777320-6 / 0197773206
ISBN-13	978-0-19-777320-8 / 9780197773208
Zustand	Neuware