Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry - Hardcover

Seo, J. Mira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199734283 ISBN 13: 9780199734283

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2013

Synopsis

How did Roman poets create character? The mythological figures that dot the landscape of Roman poetry entail their own predetermined plotlines and received characteristics: the idea of a gentle, maternal Medea is as absurd as a spineless and weak Achilles. For Roman poets, the problem is even more acute since they follow on late in a highly developed literary tradition. The fictional characters that populate Roman literature, such as Aeneas and Oedipus, link text and reader in a form of communication that is strikingly different from a first person narrator to an addressee. With Exemplary Traits, Mira Seo addresses this often overlooked question. Her study offers an examination of how Roman poets used models dynamically to create character, and how their referential approach to character reveals them mobilizing the literary tradition. Close readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca, and Statius offer a more nuanced discussion of the expectations of both authors and audiences in the Roman world than those currently available in scholarly debate. By tracing the philosophical and rhetorical concepts that underlie the function of characterization, Exemplary Traits allows for a timely reconsideration of it as a fruitful literary technique.

About this title

About the Author

J. Mira Seo is Associate Professor in the Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

Review

"In this theoretically informed study of Roman epic and tragedy, J. Mira Seo demonstrates how intertextuality both shapes and interrogates character. This is an important book whose compelling new readings of Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Statius' Thebaid, and Seneca's Oedipus and Phaedra invite reassessment of the Latin literary canon." --Carole E. Newlands, University of Colorado

"In what ways, and by what techniques, is characterization constructed in Roman poetry? How might literary models influence character-construction through a process akin to intertextual allusivity? By exploring such questions, and through its detailed readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca and Statius, this study sheds important new light on a fascinating but understudied area of Roman poetic practice." --Gareth D. Williams, Columbia University

"Seo's readings of five characters from Roman epic and tragedy are exemplary in the best sense." --CJ-Online, a service of The Classical Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199734283
• ISBN 13: 9780199734283
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240