The poetry of Alexandria under the first three Ptolemies represents a second golden age of Greek literature. The eminence grise of poetic circles was Callimachus, whose poetic manifesto in favour of small scale, meticulously detailed and mannered works was to be of great influence on Augustan poetry in Rome. The stylistic aims of the Alexandrian poets have been much discussed, as has their reliance on literary tradition. First published in 1987, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry covers less familiar ground. Taking the whole canon of Alexandrian poetry as his starting point, Dr Zanker surveys the use of the realistic mode in works like The Idylls of Theocritus (were these real shepherds?), including such matters as the humorous elements of Callimachus Hymns, the love-story in Apollonius’ ‘Argonautica’, and the low-life sketches of epyllia like Hecale as well as the Mimes of Herodas. The striving for realism and minute detail is set in the context of the admiration of pictorialism in the plastic arts, the new valuation of science as a measure of human experience, and the deliberate mingling of high and low genres. All this is in turn placed in the cultural context of early Alexandria. Few books take the whole of Alexandrian poetry as their canvas. This one which does will be as valuable a study of the Alexandrian poets as it will be a forceful contribution to literary criticism.

First published in 1988, this study explains how certain genres created by Classical poets were adapted and sometimes transformed by the poets of the modern world, beginning with the Tudor poets’ rediscovery of the Classical heritage. Most of the long-lived poetic genres are discussed, from familiar examples like the hymn, elegy and eulogy, to less familiar topics such as the recusatio (refusal to write certain kinds of poems), or formal structures such as priamel. By combining criticism with literary history, the author explores the degree to which certain poets were consciously imitating models, and demonstrates how various generic forms reflect the literary concerns of individual poets as well as the general concerns of their age. The poets discussed range over the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and in English from Wyatt to Yeats and Auden. A detailed and fascinating title, this study will appeal to teachers and students of both English and Classical literature.

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans’ defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences. Zanker’s exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.

This book gathers together many of the principal essays of Richard Hunter, whose work has been fundamental in the modern re-evaluation of Greek literature after Alexander and its reception at Rome and elsewhere. At the heart of Hunter’s work lies the high poetry of Ptolemaic Alexandria (Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius of Rhodes) and the narrative literature of later antiquity (‘the ancient novel’), but comedy, mime, didactic poetry and ancient literary criticism all fall within the scope of these studies. Principal recurrent themes are the uses and recreation of the past, the modes of poetic allusion, the moral purposes of literature, the intellectual context for ancient poetry, and the interaction of poetry and criticism. What emerges is not a literature shackled to the past and cowed by an ‘anxiety of influence’, but an energetic and constantly experimental engagement with both past and present.