
Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority
Ellen Oliensis(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 28. May 1998
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-521-57315-3 (ISBN)
Description
This book explores how Horace's poems construct the literary and social authority of their author. Bridging the traditional distinction between 'persona' and 'author', Ellen Oliensis considers Horace's poetry as one dimension of his 'face' - the projected self-image that is the basic currency of social interactions. She reads Horace's poems not only as works of art but also as social acts of face-saving, face-making and self-effacement. These acts are responsive, she suggests, to the pressure of several audiences: Horace shapes his poetry to promote his authority and to pay deference to his patrons while taking account of the envy of contemporaries and the judgement of posterity. Drawing on the insights of sociolinguistics, deconstruction and new historicism Dr Oliensis charts the poet's shifting strategies of authority and deference across his entire literary career.
Reviews / Votes
'... a dense and elegant book, whose subtle reading of individual poems are deployed in a compelling account of Horace's oeuvre as a search for poetic and social authority.' The Times Literary SupplementMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
571 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-57315-3 (9780521573153)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Content
Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Face-saving and self-defacement in the Satires; 2. Making faces at the mirror: the Epodes and the civil war; 3. Acts of enclosure: the ideology of form in the Odes; 4. Overreading the Epistles; 5. The art of self-fashioning in the Ars poetica; Postscript: Odes 4.3; Works cited; Poems discussed; General index.