Subjecting Verses:
Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real
Paul Allen Miller

Cloth | 2003 | $55.00 / £37.95
312 pp. | 6 x 9

e-Book | 2008 | $55.00 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-2593-6

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The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's.

Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, Lacan, and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time.

Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum.

Endorsement:

"This work offers a panoramic analysis of a major literary genre, important for historic as well as aesthetic reasons, and of the scholarship produced on it over the past century. It applies a range of sophisticated contemporary theoretical perspectives to illuminate the genre as a whole and specific texts within it. Its close readings abound with new insights."--Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park

Table of Contents:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
CHAPTER ONE
Toward a New History of Genre:Elegy and the Real 1
CHAPTER TWO
The Catullan Sublime,Elegy, and the Emergence of the Real 31
CHAPTER THREE
Cynthia as Symptom: Propertius, Gallus, and the Boys 60
CHAPTER FOUR
"He Do the Police in Different Voices": The Tibullan Dream Text 95
CHAPTER FIVE
Why Propertius Is a Woman 130
CHAPTER SIX
Deconstructing the Vir: Lawand the Other in the Amores 160
CHAPTER SEVEN
Displacing the Subject, Saving the Text 184
CHAPTER EIGHT
Between the Two Deaths: Technologies of the Self in Ovid's Exilic Poetry 210
NOTES 237
BIBLIOGRAPHY 277
INDEX LOCORUM 303
GENERAL INDEX 307

Another Princeton book by Paul Allen Miller:

• Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity.

Subject Areas:

• Classics
• Comparative Literature
• Poetry

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File created: 10/18/2009

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