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Thorsen ( T.S. ) (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy . Pp. xiv + 435. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013. Paper, £22.99, US$37.99 (Cased, £60, US$99). ISBN: 978-0-521-12937-4 (978-0-521-76536-7 hbk).
Reviews
This addition to the library of Cambridge Companions is devoted to the rich surviving tradition of Latin love elegy. Devotees of the works of Propertius, Tibullus, Sulpicia, Ovid and the enigmatic Gallus will find much to celebrate in the two dozen contributions of this volume, which constitutes a true primer to a vast and challenging field of literary inquiry.
The volume opens with a valuable introduction both to the subsequent chapters and to the subject of Latin elegy more generally. Six sections provide an organisational scheme for the papers: (1) the literary and historical context in which Latin elegy developed and reached its heights; (2) the individual Latin elegiac poets whose works have survived in some fashion or other (including an important chapter by M. Skoie that considers the elegies of the so-called Corpus Tibullianum); (3) the social and cultural milieu that is presupposed and explored by the extant books of elegiac carmina; (4) the death of the genre in the history of Latin literature; (5) the survival of elegy in its multifaceted Nachleben; (6)...