Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a study of Theocritus' narrating techniques, intertextual practices, and the relationship between them. By a close, careful description and analysis of these features as particularly deployed in Idylls 6, 11, 13, 24, and 15, J. Andrew Foster provides detailed readings of these specific poems, demonstrating how each poem's narrative structure and its intratextual and intertextual affiliations interact to characterize the voices and audiences expressed and imagined by the discourse. Within these poems Theocritus especially orchestrates polyphonic voices speaking to diverse fictional, ideal, and actual audiences and so authorizes a range of responses to speech-in-text. His densely allusive poems exhibit an iterative aspect and resistance to closure that particularly encourage his readers to help compose larger metanarratives in which such resolution can be achieved or the particular episode can be better understood. The interplay between the referential systems inscribed with
Table of ContentsContents: Introduction: Text, Voice, and Audience – Situational Incongruities: Narrators and Audiences in Idyll 6 – Poet and Metapoesis in Idyll 11 – Herakles the Sympotic Argonaut: Allusion, Emulation, and Narrative Innovation in Idyll 13 – Nemean 1 and Idyll 24: The Poetics of Heroic – Arsinoe as Epic Queen: Hosts, Hospitality, and Their «Reception» in Idyll 15 – Conclusion: Voices Heard and Read.
