Ideology in Cold Blood
A Reading of Lucan's Civil War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4932769 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Dewar |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 3/4 |
| Pages | 383 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Ideology in Cold Blood, Shadi Bartsch, 1997 |
| Venue | Phoenix (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8299 • E-ISSN: 1929-4883 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1088682 |
| OpenAlex | W1979036473 |
| Language | EN |
Is Lucan's epic Civil War an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that desparingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers an answer to this split debate on the Roman poet's magnum opus. Reflecting on the disintegration of the Roman Republic in the wake of the civil war that began in 49BC, Lucan (writing during the reign of Nero) recounts that fateful conflict with a strangely ambiguous portrayal of his republican hero, Pompey. Although the story is one of tragic defeat, the language of his epic is more often violent and nihilistic than heroic and tragic. Lucan is oddly fascinated by the graphic destruction of lives, the violation of human bodies - an interest paralleled in his deviant syntax and fragmented poetry. In an analysis that draws on contemporary political thought ranging from Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty to the poetry of Vietnam veternas, as well as on literary theory and ancient sources, Bartsch finds in the paradoxes of Lucan's poetry both a political irony that responds to the universally perceived need for, yet suspicion of, ideology, and a recourse to the redemptive power of storytelling
Art · Cold war · Ideology · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Spanish Civil War · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods
Style in Latin Poetry
Introduction
Nihilistic Cosmology and Catonian Ethics in Lucan's Bellum Civile
Inconsistency in Roman Epic
A Construção Da Guerra Civil Através De Dois Discursos Na Farsália, De Lucano
The Myth of the Republic
Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction
Ovid's Lovers
The carcasse speakes’
Si Credere Velis
Multi-Ethnic Armies in Virgil, Lucan, and Claudian
Wars More Than Civil
The Violation of the Eye and the Theft of Vision in Lucan's Bellum Civile
Arsacid Beverages in Lucan
The Eagle's Gaze in the Opening of Heliodorus' Aethiopica
The Aeneid Revisited
The Heredity of Senatorial Status in the Principate
Pompey’s Head and Cato’s Snakes
Pompey’s Head and the Body Politic in Lucan’s De bello civili
What Poets Do
Pharsalia as Rome's "Day of Doom" in Lucan
The Pasts of Roman Anatolia
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |