Defining Genre and Gender in Latin Literature: Essays Presented to William S. Anderson on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Lang Classical Studies)

The Roman confrontation and assimilation of Greek literature entailed a scrutiny, critique, and adaptation of generic assumptions. This book considers the ways in which major genres – among them comedy, lyric, elegy, epic, and the novel – were redefined to accommodate Roman concerns and the ways in which gender plays a role in generic definition and authorial self-definition. Both of these areas of research have been important to William S. Anderson throughout his career. This collection of essays by his students helps readers to understand the nature of Roman literary self-definition, as it honors Professor Anderson’s own achievements in this field.

The Editors: William W. Batstone is Associate Professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on Vergil’s Georgics. He is interested in literature and literary theory and has written on both the prose and poetry of the republic and early empire, including Catullus, Cicero, Propertius, Vergil, and Caesar, and modern theoretical perspectives, including Heidegger, Bakhtin, and Gadamer. He is currently working on a book on Caesar’s commentaries on the Civil War.
Garth Tissol, Associate Professor of Classics at Emory University, received his Ph.D. in classics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid’s «Metamorphoses» as well as articles on Ovid, Vergil, and Dryden’s translations of Latin literature. He is currently working on an edition and commentary on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto, Book 1.