Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence (The W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures) - Hardcover

Sharrock, Alison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521761816 ISBN 13: 9780521761819

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Synopsis

For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance. The texts are treated, and celebrated, as literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends, and intertexts. All the extant plays of Plautus and Terence have at least a bit part in this book, which seeks to expose the authors' fabulous artificiality and artifice, while playing along with their differing but interrelated poses of generic humility.

About this title

Book Description

This book undertakes a literary analysis of the comic plays of Plautus and Terence. Despite being some of the earliest Latin literature in existence, they are argued to be sophisticated literary works which require close attention from the reader, while at the same time rewarding the audience with immediate humour.

About the Author

Alison Sharrock is Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester. She is also the author of Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2 (1994) and Fifty Key Classical Authors (with Rhiannon Ash, 2002), and co-editor of Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (with Helen Morales, 2000) and The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (with Roy Gibson and Steven Green, 2006).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521761816
• ISBN 13: 9780521761819
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 334