Comprehensive coverage, accessible to students and non-specialists, of one of the most popular poets of classical antiquity.

One of the most famous voices to have survived from the Roman world, Catullus's poetry is still amongst the most popular and widely read. But what is it that makes this 2,000-year-old voice so relevant, so personal, and so endlessly fascinating? Reinvigorating discussions around the nature of Catullus's lyricism, Catullus in Twentieth-Century Music takes a completely new approach to Catullus and ideas of lyric. It centres around four musical works from the twentieth century, each one capturing the essence of Catullus in musical retellings and showcasing a very personal response to the original text. Considering how and why these musical composers used Catullus's poetry as their stimulus allows us to uncover new ideas about Catullus's poetry. By considering the very process of reception, Stephanie Oade takes a broader view of lyric, identifying traits and characteristics that are common to both music and poetry, thus transcending the boundaries of individual art forms in order to consider the genre in larger, interdisciplinary terms. It offers insights into compositional processes and challenges audiences to think about ways of engaging with music and poetry. More than anything, it shows how ancient voices continue to resound in modernity and offer everlasting expression for our own experiences and emotions.

This collection brings together twenty eight chapters written by Stephen Harrison’s colleagues and former students from around the globe to celebrate both his distinguished teaching and research career as a classicist and his outstanding and admirable service to the international classical community. The wide variety of original contributions on topics ranging from Greek to Latin and ancient literature’s reception in opera and contemporary writing is divided into five parts. Each corresponds to the staggering publication record of the honorand, encompassing, as it does, a broad literary spectrum, starting from the literature of the end of the Roman Republic and coming down to Neo-Latin and the reception of Classics in Irish, in English poetry and in European literature and culture in general. This corpus of compelling chapters is hoped to match Stephen Harrison’s rich research output in an illuminating dialogue with it.

As a well-known phenomenon in everyday communication, ambiguity has increasingly become the subject of interdisciplinary research in recent years. However, within this context, it has been observed that words or expressions situated within the artistic framework of storytelling have not yet been at the centre of research interest. This book aims to bridge this gap by examining the phenomenon of ambiguity from the perspective of narratology – understood as a general theory of narration and narrative communication. The volume pursues two goals: Firstly, it seeks to demonstrate that the interdisciplinary combination of linguistics, cultural history and narratology enriches the field of literary studies significantly. This focus not only highlights how narrative techniques often rely on everyday language conventions, but also explores how various textual features, narrative devices, or even entire storylines can be affected by phenomena (or lead to experiences) of ambiguity. These ambiguities often serve as poetic strategies that are deliberately set in the communicative process of text and reader to achieve certain narrative goals. Secondly, ambiguity – as a characteristic of (narrative) communication – seves as a linking element across different fictional (and factual) text types and genres throughout time and cultures. The collected essays cover a wide range of narrative texts, from Roman comedy to funerary reliefs, from historiographical writings to utopian tales, from Goethe’s novels to contemporary fantasy literature. In its broad approach, the volume thus contributes to the project of diachronic narratology, which, like the research on ambiguity in literary and cultural studies, has recently gained increasing momentum. The combined consideration of ambiguity and narratology not only raises awareness of phenomena of ambiguity in narrative texts but also encourage reflection on the theoretical foundations of narrative, particularly on the methods and devices used to describe these ambiguous structures. Overall, the volume represents an exploration of a relatively unexplored interdisciplinary field, aiming to stimulate further research.

Argues that Catullus adapts Roman comedy to explore private ideas about love, friendship, and social rivalry.

A new, holistic reading of Catullus emerges from convincing solutions to centuries-old problems concerning the nature of his surviving text.

Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. Sappho's and Catullus' reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho's and Catullus' modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange: key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and cover a wide range of unpublished archival material. Texts are analysed and compared through reception and translation theories and inserted within the current debate on the Classics as World Literature, demonstrating how sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry's relationship to human existence.

This book provides specially commissioned in-depth discussions of the poetry of Catullus from ten leading Latin scholars.

Both passionate and artful, learned and bawdy, Catullus is one of the best-known and critically significant poets from classical antiquity. An intriguing aspect of his poetry that has been neglected by scholars is his interest in silence, from the pauses that shape everyday conversation to linguistic taboos and cultural suppressions and the absolute silence of death. In Silence in Catullus, Benjamin Eldon Stevens offers fresh readings of this Roman poet's most important works, focusing on his purposeful evocations of silence. This deep and varied "poetics of silence" takes on many forms in Catullus's poetic corpus: underscoring the lyricism of his poetry; highlighting themes of desire, immortality-in-culture, and decay; accenting its structures and rhythms; and, Stevens suggests, even articulating underlying philosophies. Combining classical philological methods, contemporary approaches to silence in modern literature, and the most recent Catullan scholarship, this imaginative examination of Catullus offers a new interpretation of one of the ancient world's most influential and inimitable voices.

Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments decsribing the joy and pain of love. In the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty.