Download or read book Lucretian Receptions in Prose written by George Kazantzidis and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-09-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The examination of Lucretian reception in Latin poetry has been served well by scholars. Lucretius’ presence in later prose writers, on the other hand, is a topic that warrants more investigation. Susanne Gatzemeier’s 2013 monograph (Ut ait Lucretius: Die Lukrezrezeption in der lateinischen Prosa bis Laktanz) is an invaluable contribution to the topic but by no means exhaustive either in terms of the potential intertextualities it traces or in terms of its interpretive methods and insights. At the same time, recent studies implicate Lucretius’ name in discussions of prose writers who were not that often thought in the past to have engaged with the De Rerum Natura in an active way. Caesar and Livy but also Vitruvius and Tacitus are some good examples. The present volume taps into this discussion and broadens further our understanding of Lucretian reception in prose writers, including Cicero, Celsus, Seneca the Younger, Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch and Lactantius. Building on the vast scholarship on the significance of Lucretius as a model for later poets, the volume sheds new light on the De Rerum Natura’s afterlife by looking at its presence in philosophical prose, medical writing, oratory, epistolary writing and Christian theology.

Download or read book Lucretian Receptions written by Philip Hardie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius' 'De rerum natura', one of the greatest Latin poems, worked a powerful fascination on Virgil and Horace, and continued to be an important model for later poets in antiquity and after, including Milton. This innovative set of studies on the reception of Lucretius is organized round three major themes: history and time, the sublime, and knowledge. The 'De rerum natura' was foundational for Augustan poets' dealings with history and time in the new age of the principate. It is also a major document in the history of the sublime; Virgil and Horace engage with the Lucretian sublime in ways that exercised a major influence on the sublime in later antique and Renaissance literature. The 'De rerum natura' presents a confident account of the ultimate truths of the universe; later didactic and epic poets respond with varying degrees of certainty or uncertainty to the challenge of Lucretius' Epicurean gospel.

Download or read book The Lucretian Renaissance written by Gerard Passannante and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-11-25 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe. By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters—a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering. From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

Download or read book Lucretius Poet and Philosopher written by Philip R. Hardie and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six hundred years after Poggio’s retrieval of the De rerum natura, and with the recent surge of interest in Lucretius and his influence, there has never been a better time to fully assess and recognize the shaping force of his thought and poetry over European culture from antiquity to modern times. This volume offers a multidisciplinary and updated overview of Lucretius as philosopher and as poet, with special attention to how these two aspects interact. The volume includes 18 contributions by established as well as early career scholars working on Lucretius’ philosophical and poetic work, and his reception both in ancient and early modern times. All the chapters present new and original research. Section I explores core issues of Epicurean-Lucretian epistemology and ethics. Section II expounds much new material on ancient response to and reception of Lucretius. Section III presents new material and analysis on the immediate, fraught early modern reception of the poem. Section IV offers a wide collection of new and original papers on Lucretius’ fortunes in the period from Machiavelli up to Victorian times. Section V explores little known aspects of the iconographical and biographical motifs related to the De rerum natura.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius written by Stuart Gillespie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura ('On the Nature of Things') is an impassioned and visionary presentation of the materialist philosophy of Epicurus, and one of the most powerful poetic texts of antiquity. After its rediscovery in 1417 it became a controversial and seminal work in successive phases of literary history, the history of science, and the Enlightenment. In this 2007 Cambridge Companion experts in the history of literature, philosophy and science discuss the poem in its ancient contexts and in its reception both as a literary text and as a vehicle for progressive ideas. The Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Lucretius, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of classical antiquity and its reception. It is completely accessible to the reader who has only read Lucretius in translation.

Download or read book Empedocles Redivivus written by Myrto Garani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-12-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book consists of a thorough study of Lucretius’ poetic and philosophical debt to Empedocles, focusing on their respective uses of analogy and examining how both poets turn these poetic techniques to use in their epistemological approaches to nature.

Download or read book Lucretius on Creation and Evolution written by Gordon Lindsay Campbell and published by Oxford Classical Monographs. This book was released on 2003 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius' account of the origin of life, the origin of species, and human prehistory is the longest and most detailed account extant from the ancient world. It gives an anti-teleological mechanistic theory of zoogony and the origin of species that does away with the need for any divine aidor design in the process, and accordingly it has been seen as a forerunner of Darwin's theory of evolution. This commentary locates Lucretius in both the ancient and modern contexts, and treats Lucretius' ideas as very much alive rather than as historical concepts. The recent revival of creationismmakes this study particularly relevant to contemporary debate, and indeed, many of the central questions posed by creationists are those Lucretius attempts to answer.

Download or read book The Erotics of Materialism written by Jessie Hock and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Erotics of Materialism, Jessie Hock maps the intersection of poetry and natural philosophy in the early modern reception of Lucretius and his De rerum natura. Subtly revising an ancient atomist tradition that condemned poetry as frivolous, Lucretius asserted a central role for verse in the practice of natural philosophy and gave the figurative realm a powerful claim on the real by maintaining that mental and poetic images have material substance and a presence beyond the mind or page. Attending to Lucretius's own emphasis on poetry, Hock shows that early modern readers and writers were alert to the fact that Lucretian materialism entails a theory of the imagination and, ultimately, a poetics, which they were quick to absorb and adapt to their own uses. Focusing on the work of Pierre de Ronsard, Remy Belleau, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish, The Erotics of Materialism demonstrates how these poets drew on Lucretius to explore poetry's power to act in the world. Hock argues that even as classical atomist ideas contributed to the rise of empirical scientific methodologies that downgraded the capacity of the human imagination to explain material phenomena, Lucretian poetics came to stand for a poetry that gives the imagination a purchase on the real, from the practice of natural philosophy to that of politics. In her reading of Lucretian influence, Hock reveals how early modern poets were invested in what Lucretius posits as the materiality of fantasy and his expression of it in a language of desire, sex, and love. For early modern poets, Lucretian eroticism was poetic method, and De rerum natura a treatise on the poetic imagination, initiating an atomist genealogy at the heart of the lyric tradition.

Download or read book Lucretius in the Modern World written by W.R. Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - one of the glories of Latin literature - provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century. It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.

Download or read book Approaches to Lucretius written by Donncha O'Rourke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes stock of existing approaches in the interpretation of Lucretius, innovates within these, and advances in new directions.

Download or read book Lucretius Poet and Philosopher written by Philip R. Hardie and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six hundred years after Poggio’s retrieval of the De rerum natura, and with the recent surge of interest in Lucretius and his influence, there has never been a better time to fully assess and recognize the shaping force of his thought and poetry over European culture from antiquity to modern times. This volume offers a multidisciplinary and updated overview of Lucretius as philosopher and as poet, with special attention to how these two aspects interact. The volume includes 18 contributions by established as well as early career scholars working on Lucretius’ philosophical and poetic work, and his reception both in ancient and early modern times. All the chapters present new and original research. Section I explores core issues of Epicurean-Lucretian epistemology and ethics. Section II expounds much new material on ancient response to and reception of Lucretius. Section III presents new material and analysis on the immediate, fraught early modern reception of the poem. Section IV offers a wide collection of new and original papers on Lucretius’ fortunes in the period from Machiavelli up to Victorian times. Section V explores little known aspects of the iconographical and biographical motifs related to the De rerum natura.

Download or read book Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance written by Ada Palmer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God. Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse. Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

Download or read book Selected Papers on Ancient Literature and its Reception written by Philip Hardie and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers together about two thirds of the articles and essays published between 1983 and 2021 by Philip Hardie, whose work on ancient literature has been of seminal importance in the field. The centre of gravity lies in late Republican and Augustan poetry, in particular Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, with important contributions on wider Augustan culture; on Neronian and Flavian epic; on the Latin poetry of late antiquity; and on the reception of Latin poetry.

Download or read book The Oxford History of Poetry in English written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-08 with total page 717 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.

Download or read book The Reception of the Homeric Hymns written by Andrew Faulkner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reception of the Homeric Hymns is a collection of original essays exploring the reception of the Homeric Hymns and other early hexameter poems in the literature and scholarship of the first century BC and beyond. Although much work has been done on the Hymns over the past few decades, and despite their importance within the Western literary tradition, their influence on authors after the fourth century BC has so far received relatively little attention and there remains much to explore, particularly in the area of their reception in later Greco-Roman literature and art. This volume aims to address this gap in scholarship by discussing a variety of Latin and Greek texts and authors across the late Hellenistic, Imperial, and Late Antique periods, including studies of major Latin authors, such as Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, and Byzantine authors writing in classicizing verse. While much of the book deals with classical reception of the Hymns, including looking beyond the textual realm to their influence on art, the editors and contributors have extended its scope to include discussion of Italian literature of the fifteenth century, German scholarship of the nineteenth century, and the English Romantic poets, demonstrating the enduring legacy of the Homeric Hymns in the literary world.

Download or read book Homeric Receptions Across Generic and Cultural Contexts written by Athanasios Efstathiou and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective volume provides a fresh perspective on Homeric reception through a methodologically focused, interdisciplinary investigation of the transformations of Homeric epic within varying generic and cultural contexts. It explores how various aspects of Homeric poetics appeal and can be mapped on to a diversity of contexts under different socio-historical, intellectual, literary and artistic conditions. The volume brings together internationally acclaimed scholars and acute young researchers in the fields of classics and reception studies, yielding insight into the varied strategies and ideological forces that define Homeric reception in literature, scholarship and the performing arts (theatre, film and music) and shape the ‘horizon of expectations’ of readers and audience. This collection also showcases that the wide-ranging ‘migration’ of Homeric material through time and across place holds significant cultural power, being instrumental in the construction of new cultural identities. The volume is of particular interest to scholars in the fields of classics, reception and cultural studies and the performing arts, as well as to readers fascinated by ancient literature and its cultural transformations.

Download or read book Women Writing Antiquity written by Helena Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Writing Antiquity argues that the struggle to define the female intellectual in seventeenth-century France lay at the centre of a broader struggle over the definition of literature and literary knowledge during a time of significant cultural change. As the female intellectual became a figure of debate, France was also undergoing a shift away from the dominance of classical cultural models, the transition towards a standardized modern language, the development of a national literature and literary canon, and the emergence of the literary field. This book explores the intersection of these phenomena, analyzing how a range of women constructed the female intellectual through their reception of Greco-Roman culture. Women Writing Antiquity offers readings of known and less familiar works from a diverse corpus of translators, novelists, poets, linguists, playwrights, essayists, and fairy tale writers, including Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scud?ry, Madame de Villedieu, Antoinette Deshouli?res, Marie-Jeanne L'H?ritier, and Anne Dacier. Challenging traditionally formalist and source-text orientated approaches, the study reframes classical reception in terms of authorial self-fashioning and professional strategy, and explores the symbolic value of Latin literacy to an author's projected identity. These writers used reception of Greco-Roman culture to negotiate the value attributed to different genres, the nature of poetics, the legitimacy of varied modes of authorship, the qualities and properties of French, and even how and by whom these topics might be debated. Women Writing Antiquity combines a new take on the literary history of the period with a retelling of the history of the figure of the 'learned woman'.