This highly original work builds on two neglected facts about Virgil's Book of Bucolics: its popularity on the bawdy Roman stage and its impact as sequence poetry on readers and writers from the Classical world through the present day. The Bucolics profoundly influenced a wide range of canonical literary figures, from the contemporaneous Horace, Propertius, and Ovid through such successors as Calpurnius, Sannazaro, Marot, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden. As performed, the work scored early success. John Van Sickle's artfully rendered translation, its stage cues, and the explanatory notes treat for the first time the book's ten short pieces as a thematic web. He pays close heed to themes that return, vary throughout the work, and develop as leitmotifs, inviting readers to trace the threads and ultimately to experience the last eclogue as a grand finale. Introductory notes identify cues for casting, dramatic gesture, and voice, pointing to topics that stirred the Roman crowd and satisfied powerful patrons. Back notes offer clues to the ambitious literary program implicit in the voices, plots, and themes. Taken as a whole, this volume shows how the Bucolics inaugurated Virgil's lifelong campaign to colonize for Rome the prestigious Greek genres of epic and tragedy -- winning contemporary acclaim and laying the groundwork for his poetic legend. Reframing pastoral tradition in Europe and America, Van Sickle's rendering of the Book of Bucolics is ideal for students of literature and their teachers, for scholars of classical literature and the pastoral genre, and for poetological and cognitive theorists. -- A. R. Gurney, award-winning playwright and member of the Theatre Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters

This highly original work builds on two neglected facts about Virgil's Book of Bucolics: its popularity on the bawdy Roman stage and its impact as sequence poetry on readers and writers from the Classical world through the present day. The Bucolics profoundly influenced a wide range of canonical literary figures, from the contemporaneous Horace, Propertius, and Ovid through such successors as Calpurnius, Sannazaro, Marot, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden. As performed, the work scored early success. John Van Sickle's artfully rendered translation, its stage cues, and the explanatory notes treat for the first time the book's ten short pieces as a thematic web. He pays close heed to themes that return, vary throughout the work, and develop as leitmotifs, inviting readers to trace the threads and ultimately to experience the last eclogue as a grand finale. Introductory notes identify cues for casting, dramatic gesture, and voice, pointing to topics that stirred the Roman crowd and satisfied powerful patrons. Back notes offer clues to the ambitious literary program implicit in the voices, plots, and themes. Taken as a whole, this volume shows how the Bucolics inaugurated Virgil's lifelong campaign to colonize for Rome the prestigious Greek genres of epic and tragedy—winning contemporary acclaim and laying the groundwork for his poetic legend. Reframing pastoral tradition in Europe and America, Van Sickle's rendering of the Book of Bucolics is ideal for students of literature and their teachers, for scholars of classical literature and the pastoral genre, and for poetological and cognitive theorists.

"The date of the Eclogues is much debated.* A preliminary distinction is in order: that between the composition of the individual poems (which, at least in certain cases, were doubtless read immediately and circulated within a restricted group around the poet) and the publication of the final collection. There are only two obvious clues to the dating of the book: the land confiscations in the territory of Cremona and Mantua, which peaked in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi (though continuing during the early 30s BCE: cf. E. 1 and 9), and the consulship of Asinius Pollio, in 40 BCE (E. 4)"--

Horace’s book of Sermones (also called Satires) was his first published work. Rather than a collection of satirical sideswipes, as the genre might have dictated, the book is a wiry, tight, muscular, interlaced hexameter artwork of enormous originality and as far removed from the legacy of satirical writing he inherited as one can imagine. It is the work of a 29-year-old grappling with issues of personal and poetic identity during one of the most important and pivotal times in European history. Geographically, socially and genetically an outsider, Horace earned himself a seat at Rome’s top creative table, close to the heart of the political engine that was to change Rome forever. His book details a transformational journey from ‘nobody’ to ‘somebody’, and is a simultaneous invention of poet and reinvention of poetic genre. Horace’s Sermones have floated in and out of fashion ever since they first appeared, regularly eclipsed by his Odes. Today, rehabilitated, they find space in the higher levels of the school curriculum. This book provides unique insights and will be of interest to all classicists, as well as students studying core influences on European literature.

Transcending traditional studies of single translations or particular translation traditions in isolation, this is the first volume to offer a critical overview of Virgil's influence on later literature through the translation history of his poems, from the early modern period to the present day, and throughout Europe and beyond.

Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.

What can stories of magical engraved rings or prophetic inscriptions on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed the world? Writing beyond Pen and Parchment introduces readers to a Middle Ages where writing is not confined to manuscripts but is inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. Drawing on the work done at the Collaborative Research Centre “Material Text Cultures,” (SFB 933) this volume presents a comparative overview of how and where text-bearing artefacts appear in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literary traditions, and also traces the paths inscribed objects chart across multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. The volume’s focus on the raw materials and practices that shaped artefacts both mundane or fantastical in medieval narratives offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture often overlooked.