LATIN EPIC AND DIDACTIC POETRY Near Fine in Very Good+ dust jacket

Scholar's small bookplate to ffep (R. E. Fantham). Light pencil marginalia to a few pages. Light soiling to DJ with minor creasing along top edge. ; How is it possible for a poet writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained by convention as Roman epic to find his own individual voice? How do poets working in related genres - particularly didactic - see their relationship to the main epic tradition? The eleven new essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions, consider some of the strategies which writers from Lucretius onwards have employed in negotiating their relationship with their literary forebears, and staking out a place for their own work within a tradition stretching back to Hesiod and Homer. Contents: PART 1: FRAMING EPICS: EPIC, DIDACTIC AND RELATED GENRES. 1. Getting the measure of heroes: The dactylic hexameter and its detractors - Llewelyn Morgan; 2. Politian's Ambra and reading epic didactically - Andrew Laird; 3. The story of us: A narratological analysis of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura - Monica Gale; 4. From didactic to epic: Georgics 2.458 - 3.48 - Damien Nelis. PART II: GENRE AND TRADITION: VIRGIL AND AFTER. 5. Virgil's Corycius senex and Nicander's Georgica: Georgics 4.116-148 - Stephen Harrison; 6. Tradition and originality: Allusion in Valerius Flaccus' Lemnian episode - Ray Clare; 7. The repetitions of Hypsipyle - Bruce Gibson; 8. Claudian: The epic poet in the prefaces - Catherine Ware. PART III: RECEPTIONS: REINVENTING CLASSICAL EPIC. 9. Approaching Christian epic: The preface of Juvencus - Roger Green; 10. Virgilian imperialism, original sin and Fracastoro's Syphilis - Philip Hardie; 11. The Aeneid and twentieth-century Welsh poetry - Ceri Davies ; 320 pages