European Literary Tradition Research Articles

Motifs of Disguise/ Imitation in European Literary Tradition (From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century):

The article defines and examines the connection between the disguise/imitation motifs and the categories of comic and tragic within European literary tradition (from Antiquity to the Eighteenth century). The authors of this research explain the factors that make these motifs popular means of creating comic effect or tragic pathos and highlight the trends in their functioning. Disguise/imitation motifs are shown to be mostly related to situations that violate the usual norms of conformity, hierarchical relations, behavioural canons, and for this precise reason, they have a powerful affective potential, i.e. become capable of evoking strong emotions. The disguise/imitation motifs are appropriate for comic effect due to their archaic genetic links with ritual-laughter culture and their conformity to the very nature of the comic, which is based on contradictions. Tragic pathos arises as a result of tragic consequences of one’s identity loss within disguise/imitation situations, it prompts awareness of the injustice of society and the “cruelty” of fate, which are the cause of the forced rejection of one’s self. The article indicates the prospects of researching disguise/imitation motifs in modern art, where they are often employed in adventurous narratives to increase the plot’s dynamism, heighten dramatic tension, and intensify intrigue.

Folklore Motifs in Contemporary Short Fiction of Mozambique

The article explores the role of folklore tradition in the short prose of modern Mozambique. The symbiosis of the European cultural matrix, inseparable from the language in which the work is written, and the oral heritage of the Mozambican people is analyzed on the material of one of Aldino Muianga’s short stories. The story «Rosa Maria» is included in the author’s debut collection «Xitala Mati», the main material for which became the folklore «scary stories» about witchcraft and the living dead. And while in his later works Muianga focuses on acute social plots of the colonial past and post-colonial present, in the world of «Xitala Mati» there is practically no place for white people: it is not colonizers and the colonized that interact there, but it is people and spirits. The text of «Rosa Maria» is filled with numerous «conventional signs» by means of which, in the paradigm of the traditional culture of the peoples of Mozambique, the world of the dead communicates with the world of the living. These signs are intuitive to the African reader, while the European must identify and decipher them. At the same time, «Rosa Maria» shows motifs and imagery characteristic of the Gothic novel, albeit reinterpreted and modified to suit African realities. Such components of the poetics as the encounter with the infernal in the image of a beautiful woman, the gloomy colouring supported by the landscape and ominous animals, and the interest in the emotional reactions of the characters, typical of Gothic literature, allow us to see in «Rosa Maria» a hybrid genre, the roots of which should be sought both in the European literary tradition and in the folk tales of Mozambique.

Wild(e) on Stage: Manipulated Scripts and Suppressed Truths in Nadine Gordimer’s “The Amateurs”

"This paper deals with the topic of historical inheritance and literary discourse through a prismatic lens. It focuses on Nadine Gordimer, a well- known white South African writer of Anglo-Jewish and Eastern European origins, who always stood up against racism and the colonialist legacy which deviously paved the way for the apartheid system in her country. In particular, light is shed on “The Amateurs”, one of her earliest short stories and a piercing portrayal of South African segregation policies during the 1940s. At the same time, Gordimer engages here in a critical dialogue with the English fin de siècle and the comedy-of-manners genre by recollecting an episode from her youth, when she happened to play Gwendolen’s role in an amateur staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. As we shall see, “The Amateurs” is a semantically poignant story where the threads of European literary tradition, metatheatricality and personal memory are powerfully interwoven."

Swiss Literature and its Links to the European Literary Tradition

This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the interconnectedness of Swiss literature within the larger framework of European literary tradition. Through a comprehensive analysis of Swiss authors such as Herman Hesse, Blaise Cendrars, Jeremias Gotthelf, Peter Stamm, Max Frisch, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and Fleur Jaeggy, it sheds light on the significant influence of European literary movements on Swiss literature. These movements encompass romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, and avant-garde, which have been reflected and reframed through a uniquely Swiss lens. Furthermore, the paper presents a detailed examination of specific Swiss literary works to illustrate shared thematic concerns and stylistic nuances that transcend national and linguistic boundaries. The study underscores the importance of cultural exchange in enriching literary traditions and promotes a deeper understanding of the universal human experiences portrayed within Swiss and European literature.

Toni Morrison’s Politics of Feminist and European Literary Tradition: Discerning Feminist Matricentric Streaks in Morrison’s Work

This research investigates the Morrison’s novels, Sula and The Bluest Eye that how it depicts patriarchal explanation of motherhood in the Afro-American context and observe some Western / European dominant patriarchal literary tradition to explore a thrust of a feminist world view in every wake of life. The article establishes a relation of Toni Morrison’s writings with the feminist perspectives and mothering issues (particularly in black families) that led the change of minds and was highly applauded in European society. 
 The article deals with the Morrison theory on mothering to explore the experiences of black marginalized mothers that were absent in the white European patriarchal narratives on the motherhood. Drawing on Patricia Hills Collin’s concept of Black feminist Motherhood and Andrea O’Reilly’s theories on feminist mothering the study will investigate the impact of Morrison’s works that deconstruct the patriarchal discourse in western writings. Morrison’s novels playing a viable role in liberating mothering experience from suppression to rather intellectual and emotional development. This kind of mothering empowerment became a political and social act. The research follows the narrative approach and techniques of content analysis.

At the dawn of multiculturalism: the 50th anniversary of publishing Margaret Atwood’s “Survival”

In 1972, Margaret Atwood published her book “Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature”. Using a big number of facts, Atwood made a deep insight into the history of both English and French-Canadian literatures, compared them with American and European literary traditions as well as based her observations on an original concept, thus creating an invaluable introduction to Canadian literature for a wider public. In this article, we are going to give a brief review of the book which is practically unknown in Russia, focusing on the way Atwood interpreted such multicultural and quite little-known then issues as images of the First Nations and immigrants.

Wenecja – miasto skazane na zagładę w opowieści Diny Rubiny Vysokaâ voda veneciancev

The article is devoted to the analysis of spatio-temporal elements in Dina Rubina’s story Vysokaâ voda veneciancev [The High Water of the Venetians]. They are closely related to the theme of death. Venice is shown in the work as a dying city, falling into decay. Signs of destruction are clearly visible in the city landscape, and the space of Venice is largely shaped by thanatic symbolism. However, in the image of this city we will not find infernal features so often found in the European literary tradition. Venice is not a ghostly city of death, but a refuge where the heroine can forget about the traumas of the disease and get used to the idea of finality. The passage of time also reminds us of the inevitable end of existence, both in the general and in the individual dimension. Time here has a palimpsest character, which allows us to feel its continuity, shows the coexistence of the present with the past, making us realize the inevitability of the passing.

Голос Гёте в романе А. Николева «По ту сторону Тулы»

The paper examines the polygenetic nature of images and motives in the novel by Andrei Nikolev (Egunov), with particular attention on the “Faustian code”, which allows one to comprehend the European literary tradition. The writer is known to have been exceptionally passionate about Goethe’s works. He was close to the morphology of Goethe’s culture that drew the organizing world principle from the development of biological forms. Goethe’s ideas about the relationship between the cellular tissue of organisms and the expressive tissue of culture were a text-forming force in Egunov’s creativity. Goethe’s context covers a wide range of meanings: from the eschatological category of the transformation of phenomena and the world’s transformation to the farce, for example, in the story about the Hamelin piper. Nikolev’s novel has two realities overlapped without being autonomous and separate. Against the backdrop of the flickering plot of “Faust,” a plot twist appears: instead of a bet and a contract, one can see a convergence of the themes of Faust and Mephistopheles. Perception is interpreted as a respiratory problem. The narration is structured in such a way as to restrain the activity of themes associated with the image of the “fist” (Faust), transcending them with one meaning: creativity as the natural state of man. The search for the ultimate universal representation of the “poetic person” serves as the original meaning for the shape of events acquired in the novel. The mode of being that defines the poet possesses no categories of gender.

‘…At odds with heaven and hell, the gods and mankind’. Woland and the Count of Monte Cristo

Historians of literature have often studied M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita [Master i Margarita] in order to identify the sources that fuelled the author’s imagination. Considered in the context of a common European literary tradition of the 19th and 20th cc., Bulgakov’s oeuvre may reveal parallels with works of other European literatures. The article contains a comparative analysis of characters and plot lines in The Master and Margarita and The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel by A. Dumas (père), which reveals similarities in plot devices and character portrayals. Similar, too, is the period when the novel takes place — shortly after the shock of a revolution. The researcher suggests that both novels may have targeted a post-revolutionary society with ridicule and, at times, censure. The similarities between the two novels may stem from French romanticism’s enduring influence on Russian literature. At the same time, it is not impossible for the parallels with The Count of Monte Cristo to have been inspired, at least in part, by new Russian translations of Dumas’s novels in the 1920s — 1930s.

Булгаков и Лабуле. (К вопросу об источниках «Собачьего сердца»)

The article deals with the European literary tradition presenting the dog as a protagonist. The author claims that the magical story of the French politician and writer Édouard Laboulaye (1811 –1883) “The Poodle-Prince” (1867) is one of the literary sources for Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog” (1925). The fact that Laboulaye was very popular in Russia in his time is confirmed by Laboulaye’s reception in the 1860s –1920s analysis presented in the article. Laboulaye’s work containing the dominant characteristics of the distopia and social and political satire influenced the texts of Alexander Kuprin, Evgeny Zamyatin as well. The fact that since the 1910s, “The Poodle Prince” has not been republished in Russia and the USSR, can probably explain that domestic Bulgakov's studies missed it as a source inspired “Heart of a Dog.”

Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks.

The Perspective of Woman in Anita Desai's Novel Clear Light of Day

Anita Desai is a well-known writer in India. Her writings are influenced by the Indian world as well as European literary traditions. In the majority of her works, she is primarily concerned with Indian women. Anita Desai has a feminist vision that explores women's struggles against patriarchal oppression. She is distinct from other female writers in that she stresses personal redemption and inspiration. This research discusses how women struggle secretly and seek liberation in Desai's well-known novel Clear Light of Day (1980). This research focuses on Bimla, the protagonist in Desai's novel, who strives to overcome patriarchal obstacles in her search for independence, voice, and identity. The novel explores women's plight in India for a long time before and after independence in 1947, also how India's partition from Pakistan influenced both the nation and individuals. Desai concentrates chiefly on the women of the Das household, and the choices of the different female characters have in life. The fundamental aim of this research is to shed light on a woman's perspective in Indian culture. Woman in the East and India resides in unique sociological, political, and cultural circumstances. These circumstances have an essential impact on her future, identity, and personality.

The Other Arena: Poetics Goes Global in the Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1650+

AbstractThe period 1500–1650 is the period during which Europe’s poetic traditions — of ultimately Greco-Roman (i.e. Mediterranean Basin) origin — first came to be systematically exported outside the strictly European geographical sphere: the new contexts offered by the Portuguese- and especially Spanish-controlled zones of the rapidly expanding Iberian imperial world is where this first took place. This chapter moves away from the time-honoured Eurocentrisms of some of the more traditional approaches to early modern poetics by insisting upon 1500–1650+ as precisely the period during which the European literary tradition began to take on a life, or lives, of its own elsewhere across the globe. After surveying the key literary-historical developments in this connection, the chapter proceeds to consider how the Americas themselves came to be figured and indeed forged as a new zone of poetic activity — a new poetic(s) space — in early modern Ibero-American poetry itself. The selection of tropes identified and surveyed in this part of the chapter is offered as a sample of the dynamic literary phenomena that make up what we can call the poetics of the New World.

„Wieszczek białoruski” i Nikołaj Karamzin. O poezji Jana Onoszki w perspektywie komparatystycznej

The present paper presents a book of poetry by Jan Onoszko (Połock, 1828–1829–1830?; 47 poems in Polish and a preface) in view of the comparative studies (Polish-Belarusian literary relations, Polish-Russian literary relations, European literary tradition from Antiquity to the Enlightenment). The expression “the little prophet” (“our”, “provincial”) comes from the preface to the collection and several research papers about Onoszko (T. Wróblewska; D. Samborska-Kukuć). Its links with the poetry of the Russian sentimentalist Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826) are discussed on the basis of the poem From Karamzin (the problem with determining the source in Karamzin’s poetry) and the pessimistic and melancholic poems.

Gendered Silence and Misdiagnosis in the Clinical Encounter: Celia de Fréine's Blood Debts and the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland

Gendered Silence and Misdiagnosis in the Clinical Encounter:Celia de Fréine's Blood Debts and the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland* Luz Mar González-Arias (bio) … a blood disorder is a whole body issue.Unanchored, migrant—blood is its own diaspora. sinÉad gleeson, constellations (37) The history of women's health care is characterized by silenced or heavily edited episodes that have contributed to the neglect of women's bodies and minds and accordingly prevented them from receiving the best possible treatments. As Hannah Devlin has contended, this prevailing attitude toward women's health has triggered "a string of health-care scandals over several decades" in which the voices of the patients have been consistently ignored. Ireland is no exception in this respect, and its history, both past and present, is punctuated by the silencing of women's voices and bodies in the clinical encounter. The death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012 at Galway University Hospital—where, in spite of her physical distress and severe complications in the midst of a miscarriage, she was refused a termination of her pregnancy because there was still a fetal heartbeat—stands out among the recent failures of the Irish medical, religious, and political systems with respect to women, and it has left an indelible impact on the campaigns for reproductive justice in the [End Page 264] country (Holland). The CervicalCheck cancer controversy, which first emerged in 2018 and involved scores of women who received incorrect smear-test results; the brutal procedure of symphysiotomy, performed as an alternative to caesarean sections; and the hepatitis C scandal that will be the focus of this essay have also become paradigmatic examples of obstetric violence and gender imbalances in the medical history of Ireland. Celia de Fréine's collection Blood Debts, originally published in Irish as Fiacha Fola in 2004,1 and rendered into English by the author herself in 2014, is to date the only poetic articulation of the so-called hepatitis C scandal (also known as the Anti-D scandal) in Ireland. In the late 1970s about 1,600 Irish citizens, most of them women, were infected with a contaminated blood product: Anti-D immunoglobulin, also known as the Anti-D agent. The product was given to women with rhesus-negative blood who had given birth to rhesuspositive babies in order to prevent damage to the fetus in any subsequent pregnancies. This blood product was revolutionary in the prevention of rhesus disease, but it proved disastrous for the patients who received a batch manufactured in 1976 by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) from a donor who had infective hepatitis. A number of women were diagnosed with lupus, jaundice, fatigue, and a rash, but no connection between their illnesses and the toxic agent was initially established. The scandal, which has been referred to as "Ireland's greatest medical disaster" (Keane), was made public only in 1994 when evidence was provided that the BTSB had been alerted to the possibility of contamination yet had ignored the warning.2 De Fréine is "an inhabitant of liminal spaces" (Palacios-González and González-Arias 103), and her "creative force is to be found in the rich terrain between languages, genres, geographies, and literary [End Page 265] traditions" (González-Arias, "Afterword" 102). Although mainly known as a poet, she has also published numerous essays, worked successfully in opera and filmmaking, and published and produced numerous plays. Originally from Northern Ireland, she now divides her time between Dublin and Connemara; she has been inspired and influenced by English, Irish, French, and Eastern European literary traditions; she translates her own work from Irish into English, and most of her collections have appeared in dual-language format. De Fréine is a poet who upsets traditional boundaries, a characteristic that not only flavors the formal aspects of her work but also leaves its mark on the varied themes she has worked on, the volatile relationship between health and gender featuring prominently among them. In several of her collections, for instance, de Fréine has explored posttraumatic stress disorder and the demonstrations of extreme violence against women on the part of soldiers that...

La imagen de Marruecos en la "nueva" literatura catalana, o el poder de la identidad

La relación entre Marruecos y España tiene una larga historia política y cultural. Este país norteafricano, que tuvo una gran influencia en la política exterior e interior española del siglo XX, también aparece con frecuencia en la literatura española. En las representaciones románticas de la literatura orientalista española, los personajes marroquíes son representaciones estereotipadas del otro, un enemigo o una persona inferior colonizada. El moro no tiene rasgos individuales, es más bien un topos literario retratado desde el punto de vista español, y en la literatura española aún hoy en día, las palabras que representan diferentes etnias marroquíes aparecen sin especificación como sinónimos del moro. Topoi solo puede ser superado por nuevos topoi de alteridad, que pueden ser creados por una nueva generación de escritores de las antiguas colonias. El país y sus habitantes representados por estos escritores es una autorrepresentación capaz de transmitir una imagen más veraz de la realidad que los topoi profundamente arraigados en la tradición literaria europea. Además de ser una de estas nuevas autorrepresentaciones, la novela de Najat El Hachmi es un "documento de identidad" también muy especial, porque fue escrita en catalán por un autor de identidad mixta amazigh-catalán. El último patriarca y el resto de la obra literaria de Hachmi trazan los contornos de un grupo de personas que emigraron de un país árabe a España, pero no son árabes ni intentan convertirse en español. Es un espejo literario de la minoría inmigratoria mas grande de Cataluña, la comunidad amazigh. Es una reflexión profunda sobre el estar en camino del cambio de identidades que representa las realidades de Marruecos y Cataluña en la lengua de identificación elegida por el autor.

Kafkaesque motifs in Kunwar Narain’s novels

Since the 19th century European literary tradition indisputably influenced the development of Indian literature. Indian intellectuals, familiarizing particularly with the inheritance of European modernism, follow works of modernist writers, accept their key themes and motifs, thereby bring new literary devices and images into Indian literature. One of the main authors, whose novels have made a deep impact on the development of Hindi literature, is Franz Kafka. The influence of his works is extremely visible across India. Indian writers create Kafkaesque worlds and protagonists in their own novels and stories. One of Hindi novelists, who refers to Franz Kafkas motifs, is Kunwar Narain. In Indological studies his name is associated with poetry. However, he is not only a representative of New Hindi poetry (Naī Kavitā), but a novelist also. The article is focused on Franz Kafkas influence on Indian writers fiction. It is determined in what period and in which novels Kunwar Narain uses kafkaesque motifs. The perception of Kafkas worldview concept in Kunwar Narains novels is studied. It is an attempt to find out what new Indian prose-writer brings to a kafkaesque picture of world. It is also analyzed, in what Indian literary material and in what Indian literary tradition imagery he applies the images of Kafkas stories.

존 밀턴의 초기작과 유럽문학 전통

본 논문은 1645년에 출판된 존 밀턴의 작품집에 포함된 라틴어, 이탈리아어 시에서 유럽 문학의 전통, 특히 희랍로마 고전문학의 전통과 이탈리아 연애시와 소네트 전통이 어떻게 드러났는지 살핀다. 밀턴의 작품집은 책의 구성 자체가 영어시와 라틴어 시 부분이 별도로 구성되어 있고 이 시집 자체도 여러 언어를 구사하는 작가의 성취로 홍보되었다. 라틴어 시의 경우를 보면, 밀턴은 「아버님께」, 「만소」와 「데이몬의 비문」처럼 희랍로마 고전의 막대한 영향을 그대로 드러내면서 라틴어 시를 쓰긴 했으나 동시에 그는 이 시들에서 젊은 시인으로서의 야심을 대담하게 표출하고 사적인 감정을 토로하며 라틴어를 자신의 시적 언어로서 충분히 사용하였다. 이탈리아인 여성을 연모하며 이탈리아어로 연애시를 쓰는 상황을 그린 이탈리아어 소네트와 칸초네는 밀턴이 연애시라는 장르를 시도해보고 이탈리아어도 연습하는 기회였던 걸로보인다. 이 시들에서 밀턴은 페트라르칸 소네트 전통을 의식하고 이용하되 외국어 문학 전통과 외국어로 시를 쓰는 영국 시인이라는 자의식을 드러내는 데에 더 중점을 두면서 페트라르칸 소네트 전통에 적극적으로 참여하는 데에는 이르지 않았다.

ПОЭТИКА КНИГИ Ш. БАЙТЕЛЛА «ДНЕВНИК КНИГОТОРГОВЦА»

For the first time in Russian literary criticism, the article explores the success phenomenon of Shaun Bythell’s debut book, “The Diary of a Bookseller”. The explanation of enchanting popularity is made through an appeal to the poetics of the work. The author’s original intention, which launched the creative process, is analyzed, attention is drawn to the connection between the Bookstore Diary and the national and European literary tradition – the genres of the physiological essay and production novel. The correspondence of the ideological provisions of the narrative to modern public attitudes is shown: the development of private initiative in entrepreneurship, the cultivation of the image of a free personality in a person. Special attention is paid to the author’s behavior in the text, his assessments and self-esteem, his hidden convergence with the reader’s figure. In addition, the transformation of the book into a modern “literary project” is revealed – a phenomenon associated with filling a certain niche in publishing.

Erictho and Demogorgon: Poetry against Metaphysics

Erictho and Demogorgon: Poetry against Metaphysics DAVID QUINT Epic without the gods? The Roman poet Lucan (39–65 ce) created a secular counter-epic inside classical epic, removing the genre’s usual pantheon of Olympian deities and replacing them with Fortune. His Bellum civile (titled De bello civili in manuscripts, alternately titled Pharsalia) a poem about the conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey, thereby delegitimizes the emperors who succeeded the dying Roman republic, including Nero, the reigning emperor of Lucan’s day.1 They are not part of a divine plan: no such plan has ever existed. In an epic where the gods are silent or refuse to speak, Pompey’s son, Sextus, anxious to know the future, has to seek other means. In Book 6, he consults the Thessalian witch Erictho about the outcome of the approaching battle in Pharsalia. She reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier on Pompey’s republican side and makes it talk (BC 6.419–830).2 Lucan’s scene of necromancy gave birth to a major antimetaphysical strain in the European literary tradition. Among others, Dante, Cervantes, Marlowe, Spenser, Goethe, and Shelley confronted this episode of the Pharsalia and pondered its implications. Erictho’s magic is a figure for poetic making itself. It turns the supernatural into theater— the divine machinery of epic exposed as a deus ex machina— and these authors’ responses to Erictho will shift from epic into dramatic forms. In place of the gods, in place of the epic visit to the underworld, particularly in place of and in response to Aeneas’s trip to the realm of the dead arion 28.2 fall 2020 2 erictho and demogorgon in the corresponding Book 6 of the Aeneid, Lucan presents Erictho’s macabre performance: human witchcraft and intimations of an alternate, eerie numen residing in the earth, a force of nature. Subsequent readers would give this latter power a name: Demogorgon.3 Lucan links republicanism and freedom to a kind of atheism and to historical contingency. He unmasks and strips the props of religion from Caesarism and monarchy. (In vain for the poet: Lucan was forced to commit suicide in 65 ce, after he was implicated in the failed Pisonian conspiracy against Nero.) Lucan desacralizes poetry itself, which here confesses its limits, which are the limits of human mortality, even as Erictho seems, however briefly, to overcome them. No, poetry cannot literally raise the dead: it is a magic trick that makes the words on the page form into images, take life, and speak to us. Lucan answers the criticisms the philosopher and theologian make to poetry by openly acknowledging the false bottom of the hat from which poetry pulls its rabbits. It has no access to a real bottom, an underworld beyond death; it is all representation.4 The philosopher and the theologian may be poets no less than he is, but they do not want to know it, too busy, perhaps, in supporting tyranny over human minds and bodies. Plato and Augustine are two such critics on either historical side of Lucan, and they help us to understand the stakes of the Roman poet’s project. Both were dissatisfied with literature and they wanted to be something more than the great rhetoricians that they were. In the Symposium, Plato demystifies the archetypal myth of poetry, the singing of Orpheus that sought to bring Eurydice back from death: the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed and showed him the mere shadow [eidolon] of the woman he had come to seek: Eurydice herself they would not let him take, because he seemed, like the mere minstrel that he was, to be a lukewarm lover, lacking the courage to die as Alcestis died for love, and choosing rather to scheme his way, living, into Hades. And it was for this that the gods doomed him, and doomed him justly, David Quint 3 to meet his death at the hands of women. (179d)5 Behind the words of his shallowly sentimental speaker Phaedrus we can detect Plato’s familiar hostility to poetry, his objection in Book 10 of the Republic that the poet merely imitates the appearances of things and is...