The Art of Pliny's Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence - Hardcover

Marchesi, Ilaria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521882273 ISBN 13: 9780521882279

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Synopsis

In this book on intertextuality in Pliny the Younger, Professor Marchesi invites an alternative reading of Pliny's collection of private epistles: the letters are examined as the product of an authorial strategy controlling both the rhetorical fabric of individual units and their arrangement in the collection. By inserting recognisable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the still fluid practice of letter-writing the principles of composition and organisation that for his contemporaries characterised other writings as literature. Allusions become the occasion for a metapoetic dialogue, especially with the collection's privileged addressee, Tacitus. An active participant in the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his views on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a model of epistolography alternative to Cicero's and complementing those of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he also successfully carves a niche for his work in the Roman literary canon.

About this title

Book Description

This text treats Pliny's private epistles neither as a mere source of historical and social information, nor as a portrait of the artist, but as a work of literature. It studies poetic allusion in epistolary prose, thereby illuminating the cultural debates about poetry, oratory and historiography in Pliny's day.

About the Author

Ilaria Marchesi is Assistant Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Classics Programme at Hofstra University. Recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in 2005-2006 for her work on Pliny, she has published also on Horace and Petronius as well as the classical tradition in the Middle Ages.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521882273
• ISBN 13: 9780521882279
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292