Catullus (Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World) - Hardcover

Gaisser, Julia Haig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140511889X ISBN 13: 9781405118897

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Synopsis

Catullus is one of the liveliest and most appealing Roman poets. His emotion, charm, and apparent spontaneity resonate with readers as strongly today as in antiquity. This sophisticated literary and historical introduction brings Catullus to life for the modern reader and presents his poetry in all its variety of emotions, subjects, and styles.

• Places Catullus in a social, historical, and literary context
• Examines Catallus's style and subjects, and provides a literary introduction to his major themes of love, social life, and politics
• Discusses the reception of the poems by translators and interpreters

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Catullus is one of the liveliest and most appealing Roman poets. His emotion, charm, and apparent spontaneity resonate with readers as strongly today as in antiquity.

This sophisticated literary and historical introduction brings Catullus to life for the modern reader and presents his poetry in all its variety of emotions, subjects, and styles. Julia Gaisser situates Catullus in his historical context, explaining the social and sexual conventions underlying his work. She treats Catullus’s language, meters, and poetic architecture as essential elements of his poetry and shows how he has used them to achieve his poetic effects. She discusses the physical constraints and artistic possibilities of the papyrus roll, the character or persona that Catullus presents in his poetry, the ways in which his poems resonate both with each other and with earlier poetry, and the interpretations of his readers from antiquity to the present.

About the Author:

Julia Haig Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College, and a past president of the American Philological Association. She is the author of Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (1993), Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance Humanist and His World (1999), and The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception (2008), and the editor of Catullus in English (2001), and Catullus (2007).

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 140511889X
• ISBN 13: 9781405118897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256