Reading Vergil's Aeneid: An Interpretive Guide

Front Cover
Christine G. Perkell
University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 - Literary Collections - 353 pages
Vergil's Aeneid has been considered a classic, if not the classic, of Western literature for two thousand years. In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem's fundamental meaning? Does it endorse or undermine values of empire and patriarchy? Is its world view comic or tragic?

Many studies of the poem have focused primarily on selected books. The approach here is comprehensive. An introduction by editor Christine Perkell discusses the poem's historical background, its reception from antiquity to the present, and its most important themes. The book-by-book readings that follow both explicate the text and offer a variety of interpretations. Concluding topic chapters focus on the Aeneid as foundation story, the influence of Apollonius' Argonautica, the poem's female figures, and English translations of the Aeneid. Written in an accessible style and providing translations of all Latin passages, this volume will be of particular value to teachers and students of humanities courses as well as to specialists.

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Contents

Editors Introduction 325
29
SelfTelling and Theodicy in Aeneid 2
51
A Reading of Aeneid 3
64
Voices of Authority in Aeneid 4
80
Poetry and Parenthood
96
Viewing the Spectacula of Aeneid 6
111
A Reading of Aeneid 7
128
Images of Rome
148
The Saddest Book
195
Unity in Closure
210
The Aeneid as Foundation Story
231
Vanishing Bodies
251
Vergil and Apollonius
271
Five Hundred Years of Rendering the Aeneid in English
285
Notes
303
Comprehensive Bibliography
337

Aeneas and Absence
162
Killings Catalogues
178
List of Contributors
351
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

Christine Perkell is Associate Professor of Classics at Emory University. She is the author of The Poet's Truth: A study of the Poet in Virgil's ?Georgics.?

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