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Redeeming the Text

Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception

Charles Martindale author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:17th Dec '92

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Redeeming the Text cover

This book applies some of the procedures of modern critical theory to the interpretation of Latin poetry.

This book applies some of the procedures of modern critical theory (in particular reception-theory, deconstruction, theories of dialogue and the hermeneutics associated with the German philosopher Gadamer) to the interpretation of Latin poetry. Charles Martindale argues that we neither can nor should attempt to return to an 'original' meaning for ancient poems, free from later accretions and the processes of appropriation; more traditional approaches to literary enquiry conceal a metaphysics which has been put in question by various anti-foundationalist accounts of the nature of meaning and the relationship between language and what it describes. From this perspective the author examines different readings of the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Lucan, in order to suggest alternative ways in which those texts might more profitably be read. Finally he focuses on a key term for such study 'translation' and examines the epistemological questions it raises and seeks to circumvent.

"...Charles Martindale's critical libellus is a fitting companion to the other two books that have so far appeared in the series Roman Literature and its Contexts edited by Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds. The series' editors cannot be complimented too highly for the bold initiatives they have taken in sponsoring new critical perspectives in a field that, in the past, has been more resistant than responsive to such explorations." New England Classical Newsletter and Journal

ISBN: 9780521427197

Dimensions: 225mm x 138mm x 17mm

Weight: 276g

140 pages