The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors (Wisconsin Studies in Classics) - Softcover

Butler, Shane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299248240 ISBN 13: 9780299248246

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Synopsis

Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.
    Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read.
    All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.

About this title

About the Author

Shane Butler is professor of classic at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of The Hand of Cicero and editor and translator of the Latin correspondence of Renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano.

Review

"The Matter of the Page investigates the author's relationship with what he or she has written... The book's six case studies are essays ranging flexibly across the distinctions involved in this approach to writing and reading, offering close critical discussions of selected texts."--Times Literary Supplement

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0299248240
• ISBN 13: 9780299248246
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168