The Production of Space in Latin Literature

Abstract

This volume addresses, through a range of different authors and genres, Latin literature’s psychogeographical engagement with space. The volume’s title alludes to Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace of 1974, a seminal work in what is now called ‘the spatial turn’ in the humanities. Lefebvre stresses that space is to be included among the sites of hegemonic power and ideological contestation in a society and should not simply be thought of as a neutral container for human action, the setting in which it takes place. The contributions to this volume focus mainly on movement, or the mobile subject, in the experience, and making, of space rather than on the fixed monumental space within which that subject moves and acts. The contributions cover a broad terrain, both temporally (from Catullus to St Augustine) and generically (lyric, epic, elegy, satire, epistolography, historiography, autobiography, antiquarianism). They discuss the distinctively Roman experiences of space, and their intersections with empire, urbanism, identity, ethics, exile, and history. From a range of different angles they consider the specifically literary modes of the engagement with space in different genres and authors and pay special attention to the ideological stakes of this engagement.