Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship

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This ground-breaking volume connects the situatedness of genre in English poetry with developments in classical scholarship, exploring how an emphasis on the interaction between English literary criticism and Classics changes, sharpens, or perhaps even obstructs views on genre in English poetry. Genre has classical roots: both in the etymology of the word and in the history of genre criticism, which begins with Aristotle. In a similar vein, recent developments in genre studies have suggested that literary genres are not given or fixed entities, but subjective and unstable (as well as historically situated), and that the reception of genre by both writers and scholars feeds back into the way genre is articulated in specific literary works. Classical scholarship, literary criticism, and genre form a triangle of key concepts for the volume, approached in different ways and with different productive results by contributors from across the disciplines of Classics and English literature. Covering topics from the establishment of genre in the Middle Ages to the invention of female epic and the epyllion, and bringing together the works of English poets from Milton to Tennyson to Josephine Balmer, the essays collected hereargue that the reception and criticism of classical texts play a crucial part in generic formation in English poetry.

Reviews

[This book] aims to map the history and development of English poetry and the literary criticism connected to it as a story of genre discourse in dialogue with classical scholarship (p. 1). For certain contributors questions of genre are of primary concern, while for others genre appears in the midst of broader studies in reception. This is a positive, in the sense that those looking for work on classical reception (and translation) in English literature will find as much here as the reader interested specifically in the history of genre. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

Author Bio

Silvio Br is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests encompass Greek epic and lyric poetry, Attic tragedy, the Second Sophistic, mythography, rhetoric, intertextuality, narratology, and the reception of ancient themes in English literature and popular culture. Emily Hauser is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests include ancient women writers, gender and authorship in the classical world, and the reception of classical women by contemporary female authors. She has published on women writers in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the reception of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwoods The Penelopiad.