The arts of love

The five chapters that make up this short book examine the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. Each study is centred around a reading of a poem or poems together with a discussion of a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches drawn from modern scholars and theorists such as Paul Veyne, Roland Barthes an Michel Foucault. In each case, the modes of analysis involved are pressed hard to see where they may lead, and, equally, where they may show signs of strain. All Latin texts and terms are translated or closely paraphrased. Although the book concentrates on the work of the Roman elegists, the challenging insights it offers into the processes involved in the reading and appropriation of the texts of the past are relevant to scholars and students of classical literature in general, and its discussion of such key issues as history, textuality, representation, discourse, gender, ideology and metaphor will be of concern to those interested in literary theory and cultural studies.