The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics: Empire's Inward Turn

by Victoria Rimell

Overview

This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within an expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes. Victoria Rimell brings ideas and methods from literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy to bear on an extraordinary range of ancient texts rarely studied in juxtaposition, from Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Ibis, to Seneca's Letters, Statius' Achilleid and Tacitus' Annals. A series of epilogues puts these texts in conceptual dialogue with our own contemporary art world, and emphasizes the role Rome's imagination has played in the history of Western thinking about space, security and dwelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316365601
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2015
Series:	The W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Sapienza Università di Roma. The author of three previous books with Cambridge University Press - Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (2002), Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (2006) and Martial's Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram (2008) - she has published many articles on Latin literature and Roman culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: interior designs; 1. Empire without end: opening, expansion, enclosure; 2. All four corners of the world: Horace's enclaves; 3. Roman philosophy and the house of being: Seneca's Letters; 4. Blood, sweat and fears in the Roman baths; 5. Imperial enclosure, epic spectacle; 6. The homeless problem: exile, entrapment, desire.