SATIRES OF ROME Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal

Freudenburg, Kirk

5648 Cambridge University Press 2001 Very Good with no dust jacket Hardcover Unwrapped in plastic. Very small bump to back cover. Remainder mark to top of textblock (Black felt marker line) else Fine. ; 308 pages; The first complete study of Roman verse satire to appear since 1976 provides a fresh and exciting survey of the field. Rather than describing satire's history as a series of discrete achievements, it relates those achievements to one another in such a way that, in the movement from Lucilius, to Horace, to Persius, to Juvenal, we are made to sense, and see performed, the increasing pressure of imperial oversight in ancient Rome. "This new survey of Roman satire locates its most salient possibilities and effects at the center of every Roman reader's cultural and political self-understanding. This book describes the genre's numerous shifts in focus and tone over several centuries (from Lucilius to Juvenal) not as mere 'generic adjustments' that reflect the personal preferences of its authors, but as separate chapters in a special, generically encoded story of Rome's lost, and much lionized, Republican identity. Freedom exists in performance in ancient Rome: it is a 'spoken' entity. As a result, satire's programmatic shifts, from 'open' to 'understated' to 'cryptic' and so on, can never be purely 'literary' and 'apolitical' in focus and/or tone. In Satires of Rome, Professor Freudenburg reads these shifts as the genre's unique way of staging and agonizing over a crisis in Roman identity. Satire's standard 'genre question' in this book becomes a question of the Roman self" (Publisher) 0521803578 $55.00USD
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