Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome

by Miller,Paul Allen

• ISBN13: 9780415105187
• ISBN10: 0415105188
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-06-08
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousnesspresents a model for studying the history of lyric as a genre. Paul Allen Miller draws a distinction between the work of the Greek lyricists and the more condensed, personal poetry that we associate with lyric. He then confronts the theoretical issues and presents a sophisticated, Bakhtinian reading of the development of the lyric form from its origins in archaic Greece to the more individualist style of Augustan Rome. The book examines different forms of poetic subjectivity projected by ancient authors--Archilochus, Sappho, Catullus and Horace--through a close reading of both their texts and contexts. Miller argues that what is considered lyric--a short personal poem which reveals a reflexive subjective consciousness--is only possible in a culture of writing. It is the lyric collection which creates literary consciousness as we know it. This consciousness also requires a social structure where individuals can speak in their own names, notmerely in that of their state or class.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
The Subject of the Text	p. 1
Epos and Iambos or Archilochus Meets the Wolfman	p. 9
De Generibus Disputandum Est	p. 37
The Garden of Forking Paths	p. 52
A Poet's Place	p. 78
Sapphica Puella	p. 101
Rome, Alexandria, and the Politics of Lyric	p. 120
Horace, Mercury, and Augustus	p. 141
Conclusion: of Writings and Subjects	p. 169
	p. 178
	p. 182
Notes	p. 184
References	p. 211
Index	p. 230
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