Approaches to Lucretius

Donncha O'Rourke is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility (forthcoming) and co-editor of Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond: Knowledge, Power, Tradition (2019).

• Introduction; Part I. The Text: 1. Critical responses to the most difficult textual problem in Lucretius David Butterfield; Part II. Lucretius and his Readers: 2. Reading the 'implied author' in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Nora Goldschmidt; 3. Common ground in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Barnaby Taylor; 4. Coming to know Epicurus' truth: distributed cognition in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Fabio Tutrone; Part III. The Word and the World: 5. Infinity, enclosure and false closure in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura Donncha O'Rourke; 6. Lucretian echoes: sound as metaphor for literary allusion in De Rerum Natura 4.549-94 Jason Nethercut; 7. Saussure's cahiers and Lucretius' elementa: a re-consideration of the letters-atoms analogy Wilson H. Shearin; Part IV. Literary and Philosophical Sources: 8. Arguing over text(s): master-texts vs intertexts in the criticism of Lucretius Andrew Morrison; 9. Lucretius and the philosophical use of literary persuasion Tim O'Keefe; 10. The rising and setting soul in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 3 Emma Gee; Part V. Worldviews: 11. Was Memmius a good king? Joseph Farrell; 12. A tribute to a hero: Marx's interpretation of Epicurus in his dissertation Elizabeth Asmis; 13. Plato and Lucretius on the theoretical subject Duncan F. Kennedy.

'This rich volume will help all students and readers of Lucretius's poem challenge their preconceptions about it. All in, this volume represents an exciting collection of views on Lucretius that will undoubtedly inspire further scholarship not simply by setting out practical approaches for others to draw on and build upon but by showing how risking the unusual in our literary and philosophical thought can yield rich harvests from the seemingly familiar.' Emma Woolerton, Bryn Mawr Classical Review