Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy

by Gardner, Hunter H.

• ISBN13: 9780199652396
• ISBN10: 0199652392
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegyexamines how and why time appears to affect men and women differently in Latin love elegy. Considering the genre's brief flowering during the Augustan Principate, it aims to situate the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu. The volume argues that the imperatives of the new regime, which encouraged a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government, placed temporal pressures on the elite male that shaped theamator's (poet-lover's) resistance to enter a course of civil service and prompted his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved. In the second part of the volume Gardner focuses on the divergent temporal experiences of theamatorand his beloved courtesan-puella(girl) through the lens of 'women's time' (le temps des femmes) and thechora, as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's model of feminine subjectivity, defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity, allows us to understand how the beloved's marginalization from the realm of historical time proves advantageous to heramator, wishing to defer his entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of 'women's time' and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how 'women's time' ultimately thwarts theamator's often promised generic evolution.

Author Biography

Hunter H. Gardner is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics and affiliate of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her other publications include articles on Catullus, Ovid's Remedia Amoris, and the Greek comic poet Menander.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
Part One: Arrested Development
2. Coming-of-Age in Augustan Rome
3. Taming the Velox Puella
4. Two Senes: Delia and Messalla
5. Ovid: Elegy at the Crossroads
Part Two: Unveiling Aurora: From Puella Relicta to Puella Anus
6. The Waiting Game
7. Nature, Culture and the Puella Anus
8. Departure Strategies: The Elegist in Men's Time
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index