Complex Inferiorities : The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature

The deliberate adoption of a 'weaker' voice by a speaker not obliged to do so is a widespread phenomenon in Latin literature. This volume traces this strategy across a range of genres, periods, and authors, exploring how it establishes, perpetuates, and challenges hierarchies and values in very different literary and cultural-political contexts.

Sebastian Matzner, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, King's College London, Stephen Harrison, Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford; Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Sebastian Matzner is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. His research focuses on interactions between ancient and modern literature and thought, especially in the fields of poetics and rhetoric, literary and critical theory, history of sexualities, LGBTQ studies, and traditions of classicism. He has published several articles and book chapters in these fields and is the author of Rethinking Metonymy: Literary Theory and Poetic Practice from Pindar to Jakobson (OUP, 2016) as well as co-editor of a forthcoming OUP volume entitled Metalepsis: Ancient Texts, New Perspectives (with Gail Trimble).

Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College. His main research and teaching interests are in Latin literature and its reception. He has written monographs on Vergil, Horace, and Apuleius, and has edited, co-edited, or co-authored more than twenty books on Vergil, Horace, the Roman novel, Classics and literary theory, and Latin literature in general, as well as on the reception of classical literature. His recent publications include Victorian Horace: Classics and Class (Bloomsbury, 2017) and a commentary on Horace Odes 2 (CUP, 2017).