Seneca and the Self

David Wray editor Shadi Bartsch editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:23rd Jul '09

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Seneca and the Self cover

Twelve essays by internationally well-known scholars which reshape our understanding of Seneca as a student of the human psyche.

Many modern critics have treated Seneca as an innovator in historical understandings of 'selfhood' and self-awareness. This volume of essays by internationally well-known scholars promises to reshape our understanding of Seneca, and to establish once and for all his place as a student of the human psyche.This collection of essays by well-known scholars of Seneca focuses on the multifaceted ways in which Seneca, as philosopher, politician, poet and Roman senator, engaged with the question of ethical selfhood. The contributors explore the main cruces of Senecan scholarship, such as whether Seneca's treatment of the self is original in its historical context; whether Seneca's Stoicism can be reconciled with the pull of rhetorical and literary self-expression; and how Seneca claims to teach psychic self-integration. Most importantly, the contributors debate to what degree, if at all, the absence of a technically articulated concept of selfhood should cause us to hesitate in seeking a distinctively Senecan self - one that stands out not only for the 'intensity of its relations to self', as Foucault famously put it, but also for the way in which those relations to self are couched.

"Taken together, this collection lends its considerable weight to ways of reading Seneca that have been considered risky or even insupportable for too long, and that is all to the good. " --BCMR

ISBN: 9780521888387

Dimensions: 235mm x 160mm x 20mm

Weight: 640g

316 pages