In a book as beautifully written as the poetry it celebrates, Kathryn Gutzwiller uses the famous Idylls of Theocritus to show us the formative processes at work in the creation of a literary genre--the pastoral--and how the very structure of a genre both shapes and limits judgments about it. Gutzwiller argues that Theocritus' position as first pastoralist has haunted critical assessments of him. Was he merely a beginner, whose simple descriptions of country life were reworked by Vergil into poems of imagination and tender feeling? Or was he a genius of great creative ability, who first found the way to encapsulate in humble detail a metaphysical vision of man's emotional core? Examining Theocritus from the point of view of "beginnings," Gutzwiller succeeds in placing him both within his native Greek intellectual tradition and within the tradition of critical commentary on pastoral. As she points out, "beginnings are hard to pin down . . . the thing begun did not exist before and yet its composite parts were already somewhere in existence." Gutzwiller provides an analysis of the herdsman figure in pre-Hellenistic Greek literature, showing that the simple shepherd or goatherd had long been used as a figure of analogy for characters of higher rank. Theocritus was the first poet to focus on the shepherd himself and bring the analogies down into the pastoral world. Through her careful analyses of the seven pastoral Idylls, Gutzwiller demonstrates that in turning the focus on the shepherd Theocritus created a group of literary works with an inner structure so unique that later readers considered it a new genre. In her conclusion Gutzwiller explores subsequent controversies about the pastoral, from ancient to modern times, revealing how they continue to reflect the structural pattern that originated in Theocritus's poetry.

Brill's Companion to Theocritus offers an up-to-date guide to a thorough understanding of Theocritus’ literary output. Exploring his corpus from a variety of novel perspectives, it presents a detailed account of the intricacy of Theocritus’ poetic art.

A careful re-evaluation of pastoral poetics in the early modern Hispanic literature of Spain and Latin America. In her analysis of the verse of representative poets of the Hispanic Baroque, Holloway demonstrates how these writers occupy an Arcadia which is de-familiarised and yet remains connected to the classical origins of the mode. Herstudy includes recent manuscript discoveries from the Spanish Baroque (Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa, now attributed to the Gongorist poet Pedro Soto de Rojas), the poetry of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Francisco de Quevedo. The study considers pastoral as a global cultural phenomenon of the Early Modern period, its reverberations reaching as far as Viceregal Peru. The tradition of the pastoral as a site for the discussion of 'great matters in theforest' has deep roots, and re-emerges to praise the urban hearts of empire. Furthermore, it proves to be a site of spiritual encounter--a poetic space that frames the staging of indigenous conversion in the poetry of Diego Mexiaand Fernando de Valverde. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text. Anne Holloway is a Lecturer in Spanish, Queen's University Belfast.

William Allan's Very Short Introduction provides a concise and lively guide to the major authors, genres, and periods of classical literature. Drawing upon a wealth of material, he reveals just what makes the 'classics' such masterpieces and why they continue to influence and fascinate today.

Callimachus has usually been seen as the archetypal ivory-tower poet, the epitome if not the inventor of the concept of art for art's sake, author of erudite works written to be read in book form by fellow poets and scholars. Abundant evidence, much of it assembled here for the first time, suggests a very different story: a world of civic festivals rather than books and libraries, a world in which poetry and poets played a central and public role. In the course of the argument, Cameron casts fresh light on the lives, dates, works, and interrelationships of most of the other leading poets of the age. Another axiom of modern scholarship is that the object of Callimachus's literary polemic was epic. Yet Cameron shows that the thriving school of epic poets celebrating the wars of Hellenistic kings that has so dominated modern study simply never existed. Elegy was the fashionable genre of the age, and the bone of contention between Callimachus and his rivals (all fellow elegists) was the nature of elegiac narrative. A final chapter sketches some of the implications of this revised view of Callimachus and his world for the interpretation of Roman, especially Augustan, poetry. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.