Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood

This book applies comparative cultural and literary models to a reading of Catullus' poems as social performances of a 'poetics of manhood': a competitively, often outrageously, self-allusive bid for recognition and admiration. Earlier readings of Catullus, based on Romantic and Modernist notions of 'lyric' poetry, have tended to focus on the relationship with Lesbia and to ignore the majority of the shorter poems, which are instead directed at other men. Professor Wray approaches these poems in the light of new models for understanding male social interaction in the premodern Mediterranean, placing them in their specifically Roman historical context while bringing out their strikingly 'postmodern' qualities. The result is a new way of reading the fiercely aggressive and delicately refined agonism performed in Catullus' shorter poems. All Latin and Greek quoted is supplied with an English translation.

First sentence: New thinking from a new book: a fair enough expectation, even when the new book is a literary study of an ancient poet, and even when the ancient poet is Catullus.

Year

2007

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

1

Pages

258

ISBN

9780521030694

Data source: Wikidata