Learned girls and male persuasion
Subtitle: gender and reading in Roman love elegy
By: Sharon L. James.
Series: Joan Palevsky imprint in classical literature
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 350
Subjects: Elegiac poetry, Latin -- History and criticism.; Love poetry, Latin -- History and criticism.; Persuasion (Rhetoric) -- History -- To 1500.; Man-woman relationships in literature.; Women -- Books and reading -- Rome.; Women and literature -- Rome.; Books and reading -- Rome.; Sex role in literature.; Women in literature.
Description: "This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century B.C.E. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed - the docta puella, or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers - as plaint and confession - but rather from the viewpoint of the women - thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation - James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before. Her innovative study yields important new insights into both the literary and sociopolitical contexts of Roman love elegy."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-335) and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Pt. 1; title: Concepts, structures, and characters in Roman love elegy; title: Introduction: approaching elegy; title: Men, women, poetry, and money: the material bases and social backgrounds of elegy; title: Pt. 2; title: The material girls and the arguments of elegy; or, The docta puella reads elegy; title: Against the greedy girl; or, The docta puella does not live by elegy alone; title: Characters, complaints, and the stations of the lover; or, Adventures and laments in elegy; title: Pt. 3; title: Problems of gender and genre, text and audience, in Roman love elegy; title: Necessary female beauty and generic male resentment: reading elegy through Ovid; title: Poetry, politics, sex, status: how the docta puella serves elegy.