rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Pestilence and the body politic in Latin literature
  name:
    name part: Gardner, Hunter H.
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: enk
    date issued: 2019
    edition: First edition.
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: x, 303 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
  abstract: Scientists, journalists, novelists and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14 CE), relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Theorists such as Susan Sontag and Rene Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in an environment signalling both reversion to a prehistoric Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola's paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.
  note: Hunter H. Gardner.
  note: Includes bibliographical references (pages [275]-289) and indexes.
  subject:
    geographic code: ff-----
  subject:
    topic: Latin literature
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: Diseases in literature
  subject:
    topic: Epidemics
    geographic: Rome
    topic: History
  subject:
    topic: Epidemics in literature
  classification: PA6023.A2 G37 2019
  classification: 870.9
  identifier: 0198796420
  identifier: 9780198796428
  record info:
    record content source: YDX
    record creation date: 181206
    record change date: 20200117104317.0
    record identifier: in00004154950