The invisible satirist : Juvenal and second-century Rome /
This book offers a new reading of the Satires of Juvenal, rediscovering the poet as a smart and scathing commentator on the cultural and political world of second-century Rome. The study is unified by the idea of Juvenal as an "invisible satirist." Previous studies have focused on the natu...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English Greek, Ancient (to 1453) Latin |
| Language Notes: | Text in English, Ancient Greek, and Latin. |
| Published: |
New York :
Oxford University Press,
2014.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book offers a new reading of the Satires of Juvenal, rediscovering the poet as a smart and scathing commentator on the cultural and political world of second-century Rome. The study is unified by the idea of Juvenal as an "invisible satirist." Previous studies have focused on the nature of his poetic persona, but this study argues that Juvenal creates no coherent character in his Satires. Rather, the satirist flaunts his ability to disguise his identity, to shift voices and provoke his audience with contradictory perspectives and ideas. The Invisible Satirist links these techniques to comparable phenomena in contemporary rhetoric and philosophy, particularly the shape-shifting performances of the sophists and the acerbic sermons of the Cynic philosophers. Individual chapters use close readings of the Satires to demonstrate Juvenal's engagement with key issues of his period: the problem of critical speech at Rome; the changing nature of Roman identity amid the fluid multiculturalism of the second-century Empire; and the relationship that Greeks and Romans had with their past. The Juvenal who emerges is both more elusive in his poetics, and far more engaged with the culture and politics of Trajanic and Hadrianic Rome, than has previously been realized. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xi, 260 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780199387298 019938729X |