Projects / Programmes
Empire and Transformation of Genre in Roman Literature
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.07.00 |
Humanities |
Literary sciences |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.02 |
Humanities |
Languages and Literature |
Roman literature, Roman empire, genre, theory of genre
Data for the last 5 years (citations for the last 10 years) on
April 18, 2024;
A3 for period
2018-2022
Data for ARIS tenders (
04.04.2019 – Programme tender,
archive
)
| Database |
Linked records |
Citations |
Pure citations |
Average pure citations |
| WoS |
18 |
9 |
9 |
0.5 |
| Scopus |
29 |
15 |
12 |
0.41 |
Researchers (5)
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The topic suggested by the title goes far beyond the permanence of (Roman) empire as a literary theme. It is very specifically related to the question of genre. Due to the deep structural role genre played in Greco-Roman literature, it is sometimes able to reflect political and cultural changes very sharply. Empire in its political and geographical manifestations was arguably one of the major transformative agents of the kind. At the same time, it is often useful to see the idea of empire as a generic constituent in order to understand better the manifold, affirmative, agnostic, critical, oppositional attitudes toward the Roman empire and empire as such. Latin literature was born from the expansion of the (Republican) empire: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. But recognising this historical fact does not in itself amount to asking how the Roman empire as a historical (political, social, cultural) reality could be operative in (re)structuring Greek literary genres, their “language” in the broadest sense of the word: how did the official annals become “historiography”? How did they shape Roman epic at its early stage? What is original about the ways historiographers of the late republic and of the imperial era deal with the (anachronistic) constrictions of this tradition? How did Catullus intervene in the Roman tradition of epic with his experimental poem on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a poem dealing with both cosmic history and erotic affairs? Whatdo biography and elegy have to do with Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem promoting an imperium sine fine? How “Augustan” is Ovid in his Metamorphoses and in the Fasti, two poems that cannot be read without suspicion of political subversion? Did he really resign to imperial adulation in his exile poetry? What political messages can the apparently apolitical Flavian epic suggest in the context of the development of the genre? In what ways does empire as a cultural reality affect the form of Martial’s collections of epigrams and of Statius’ occasional poetry in the Silvae? Are Suetonius’s Lives of Caesars really as politically irrelevant as they seem to be? Is it possible to classify Lactantius’ Divine institutes as a genre, and what was his original contribution to Latin philosophical prose and rhetoric? What happened to universal history and to epistolography in the Christian context? These are only a few provisional questions illustrating the range of the topic on one side and its conceptual precision on the other. The project will bring together a group of scholars, some of them at the start of their career, interested in both formal and historical aspects of Roman literature and covering a broad range of authors, periods and genres, from epic to elegy, epigram and occasional poetry, from historiography to biography and epistolography. Particular attention will be paid to the metamorphoses of traditional genres in early Christian and late antique pagan prose (historiography, panegyric, epistle, apologetical and other polemical writing). The project is oriented, already in the phase of proposal, toward thematically focused international collaboration, including organisation of workshops and conferences and internationally relevant publications, taking advantage of already exsisting institutional and individual collaboration.
