Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

AvHunter H. Gardner,University of South Carolina) Gardner, Hunter H. (Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature,Hunter H Gardner

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Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14 CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Theorists such as Susan Sontag and René Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in an environment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola's paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2019-07-16
Mått143 x 220 x 25 mm
Vikt524 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor316
FörlagOUP OXFORD
ISBN9780198796428

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Hunter H. Gardner is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches a wide range of courses on Greek, Latin, and the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean. She is the author of Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (OUP, 2013) and co-editor of Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (with Sheila Murnaghan; Ohio State University Press, 2014).

FrontmatterList of Illustrations0: IntroductionPART 1: Tabula Rasa: A New Kind of Plague Narrative1: Roman Pestilence: Tenor and Vehicle1.1: Experiencing and observing epidemic disease in ancient Rome1.2: Theorizing fictions of the end1.3: Caveat: on the dangers of invoking plague discourse2: Livy, Pestilentia, and the Pathologies of Class Strife2.1: Plague and seditio of the fifth century2.2: Pestilence and the lectisternium of 399 BCE2.3: Plague and Rome's ludi scaeniciPART 2: Experiments in Apocalyptic Thinking3: Human and Civic Corpora in Lucretius' Treatment of the Athenian Plague3.1: Transgressing the threshold of death3.2: Repetition, accumulation, and iterative mortality3.3: Contending for "one's own": familial devotion and civic discord3.4: Terminating the interminable: saecular and literary evolutions4: Plague, Civil War, and Epochal Evolution in Vergil's Georgics4.1: Plague and the (post-) apocalypse: inverting the ages in Vergil's Noricum4.2: Bees and the body politic4.3: Coda: the Cretan plague of Aeneid 35: That Other Dream of Plague: Augustus' Novus Ordo and Ovid's Origin of the Myrmidons5.1: Noricum in Aegina: Ovid's Georgic plague5.2: The ties that bind: familial bonds and the Aeginetan Plague5.3: The old pietas of Aegina and the Augustan Principate5.4: Toward a new kind of pietas5.5: Ants as citizens: anticipating another dream of plague5.6: No one wants a plague, of course: a chance to begin again5.7: Coda: Metamorphoses 15PART 3: Transmitting Roman Plague6: Imperial Receptions: Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus6.1: Lucan and the rabies of civil war6.2: Quasi-plague and failed closure in Bellum Civile6.3: Seneca's Oedipus6.4: Refractions of a new order6.5: Pro misera pietas!6.6: Plague, individualism, and exemplary behavior in Silius Italicus' Punica7: Relapse: Transmitting Roman Plague in the West7.1: Endelechius and Paulus: Christian visions of a New Jerusalem7.2: Visions of chaos, manifestations of order: plague iconography in the Italian Renaissance and beyond7.3: A new order for homo sapiens? From biopolitics to bioengineering in Anglo-American fiction7.4: EpilogueEndmatterBibliographyIndex