Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond: Knowledge, Power, Tradition (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781910589793)

Here a team of established scholars offers new perspectives on poetic texts of wisdom, learning and teaching related to the great line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. In previous scholarship, a drive to classify Greek and Latin didactic poetry has engaged with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre. The present volume approaches didactic poetry from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient near-eastern and contemporary African traditions). The issues raised include knowledge in its relation to power; the cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; the interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; the authority of the teacher.

Author: Lilah Grace Canevaro
ISBN-10: 1910589799
ISBN-13: 9781910589793
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
Language: English
Published: 12/01/2019
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 0.90d