The Space That Remains

Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity

Bibliographic Data

ID9294641
AuthorsAaron Pelttari (Institute of History and Archaeology, corresponding author)
Year2014
Publication date2014-09-08
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueSpace That Remains (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCornell University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.7591/9780801455001
OpenAlexW624119703
Open LibraryOL34629986M
ISBN9780801455001
GOOGLE_BOOK_IDFu5IDwAAQBAJ
LanguageEN
Citations received47

When we think of Roman Poetry, the names most likely to come to mind are Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, who flourished during the age of Augustus. The genius of Imperial poets such as Juvenal, Martial, and Statius is now generally recognized, but the final years of the Roman Empire are not normally associated with poetic achievement. Recently, however, classical scholars have begun reassessing a number of poets from Late Antiquity—names such as Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius—understanding them as artists of considerable talent and influence. In The Space That Remains, Aaron Pelttari offers the first systematic study of these fourth-century poets since Michael Robert's foundational The Jeweled Style (Cornell, 1989). It is the first to give equal attention to both Christian and Pagan poetry and the first to take seriously the issue of readership. Like the Roman Empire, Latin literature was in a state of flux during the fourth century. As Pelttari shows, the period marked a turn towards forms of writing that privilege the reader’s active involvement in shaping the meaning of the text. In the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius we can see the increasing importance of distinctions between old and new, ancient and modern, forgotten and remembered. The strange traditionalism and verbalism of the day often concealed a desire for immediacy and presence. We can see these changes most clearly in the expectations placed upon readers. The space that remains is the space that the reader comes to inhabit, as would increasingly become the case in the literature of the Latin Middle Ages

Art · Late Antiquity · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Reading (process · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Philosophy · Authors and readers · Classical philology · History and criticism · Latin poetry · Latin poetry, history and criticism · Reader-response criticism