The Roman Self in Late Antiquity - Marc Mastrangelo

Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul

KORTE INHOUD

?Over the past fifty years, several studies have stressed Prudential? Christian remodelling of traditional Roman culture, through the polemic of his Contra Symmachus, the use of Roman civic language and terminology in the martyr-poems (Peristephanon), and the complex allusiveness to (above all!) Virgil in his poems generally. Marc Mastrangelo takes the argument simnifically further, identifying a fusion of Roman poetry and Christianity in Prudentius, and a grand narrative of Roman christian identity-construction, with strong contemporary application to the late fourth-century empire of Theodosius I, in the one poem of his generally assumed to lack a historical dimension, the allegorical battle between virtues and vices in (or of) the soul (Psychomachia). M. applies modern critical and cultural analysis, and is particularly influenced by Lyotard?s and later critics? work on the historical-cultural function of narrative; but his principal debt is to John D. Dawson?s complex study of Jewish-Christian biblical in...
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2008Uitgever: The Johns Hopkins University Press272 paginasISBN-10: 0801887224ISBN-13: 9780801887222

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