Product details
- ISBN 9780801452765
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 08 Sep 2014
- Publisher: Cornell University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In The Space That Remains, Aaron Pelttari offers the first systematic study of the major fourth-century poets since Michael Robert's foundational The Jeweled Style. It is the first book to give equal attention to both Christian and Pagan poetry and the first to take seriously the issue of readership.
As Pelttari shows, the period marked a turn towards forms of writing that privilege the reader's active involvement in shaping the meaning of the text. In the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius we can see the increasing importance of distinctions between old and new, ancient and modern, forgotten and remembered. The strange traditionalism and verbalism of the day often concealed a desire for immediacy and presence. We can see these changes most clearly in the expectations placed upon readers. The space that remains is the space that the reader comes to inhabit, as would increasingly become the case in the literature of the Latin Middle Ages.
Aaron Pelttari is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh.
