Cultivating the muse : struggles for power and inspiration in classical literature
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Bibliographic Information
Cultivating the muse : struggles for power and inspiration in classical literature
Oxford University Press, 2002
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Note
Bibliography: p. [279]-301
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vital forms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists - or victims - in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and
muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fates and explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent
debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1. Introduction: Secularizing the Muse
- 2. Plato's Muses: The Goddesses that Endure
- 3. The Envied Muse: Plato versus Homer
- 4. Reinscribing the Muse: Greek Drama and the Discourse of Inspired Creativity
- 5. Stealing Apollo's Lyre
- 6. Authority and Ontology of the Muses in Epic Reception
- 7. Masculinity under Threat: the Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry
- 8. The Untouched Self: Sapphic and Catullan Muses in Horace, Odes 1. 22
- 9. The Muse Unruly and Dead: Acanthis in Propertius 4 . 5
- 10. An A-musing Tale: Gender, Genre, and Ovid
- 11. Muse and Power in the Poetry of Statius
- 12. Corny Copa, the Motel Muse
- References
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"