Reviews for First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic I

The average rating for First-Person Fictions: Pindar's Poetic I based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-05 00:00:00 Carmen Gauvreau "What gives us permission to connect one text to another?" This is a detailed (mind-blowingly so) documentation of how repetition in Latin poetry might be construed as allusion, and, as such, is an immensely valuable tool to classicists working on reception, intertextuality or other relational readings. As Wills states, we generally understand allusions on the basis of diction or narrative similarities - he expands this to look at allusions based on syntax, line position, metrical position, position in speech etc. The limitation of this approach is that it doesn't transfer to Latin allusions or intertexts in other languages (e.g. Italian, French or English) where the acknowledgement of a classical model might be clearly indicated but the syntax, grammar or metrical systems of the imitative language simply don't allow a `repetition' of the original Latin. Nevertheless, Wills has based his research on an important question: `what gives us permission to connect one text to another?' - this book focuses on technical `permissions' rather than interpretative ones, as Wills himself acknowledges, and gives us an exhaustive set of examples. So this is an important book, one that we might think of as an enabling tool rather than as something which pushes further in terms of theory. The extensive index of quoted passages, however, makes this immensely valuable to any Latinists working on intertextuality, allusion and reception.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-07 00:00:00 Ronald Dorchak I would have never gained any understanding of Chapters 4 and 5 of Omeros with out it. Epic is a great resource.