Roman Literary Cultures

"Alison Keith and Jonathan Edmondson have collected a fine body of work that builds on the legacy of Fantham's Roman Literary Culture. Each contribution is clearly written, and spaciously argued. The shear breadth of the coverage ensures that all students of Roman literature can find something of interest." -- Catherine Connors, Department of Classics, University of Washington

Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature.

Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature, from mid-republican Rome in the second century BC to the Second Sophistic in the second century AD. The contributors explore Latin texts both famous and obscure, from Roman drama and Menippean satire through Latin elegies, epics, and novels to letters issued by Roman emperors and compilations of laws.

Each of the essays in this volume combines close reading of Latin literary texts with historical and cultural contextualization, making the collection an accessible and engaging combination of formalist criticism and historicist exegesis that attends to the many ways in which classical Latin literature participated in ancient Roman civic debates.