Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The semiotics of structure
- Chapter 2 Sed quid ego tam gloriose? Pliny's poetics of choice
- Chapter 3 The importance of being Secundus: Tacitus' voice in Pliny's letters
- Chapter 4 Storming historiography: Pliny's voice in Tacitus' text
- Chapter 5 Overcoming Ciceronian anxiety: Pliny's niche/nike in literary history
- From dawn till dusk: four notes in lieu of a conclusion
- Appendix to chapter 5
- List of works cited
- General index
- Index locorum
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The semiotics of structure
- Chapter 2 Sed quid ego tam gloriose? Pliny's poetics of choice
- Chapter 3 The importance of being Secundus: Tacitus' voice in Pliny's letters
- Chapter 4 Storming historiography: Pliny's voice in Tacitus' text
- Chapter 5 Overcoming Ciceronian anxiety: Pliny's niche/nike in literary history
- From dawn till dusk: four notes in lieu of a conclusion
- Appendix to chapter 5
- List of works cited
- General index
- Index locorum
Summary
This book is about what makes Pliny's collection of private correspondence a literary work. While the epistles have previously been studied as a source of historical information, recent critical interest in Pliny has acquired a larger focus. Works such as Hoffer's on the anxieties of Pliny the Younger or the collective endeavor of the Manchester and Menaggio conferences on Pliny and his social, political and cultural worlds have illuminated Pliny's engagement with central issues of his times. These contributions, however, have largely been animated by an interpretation of the epistles that is exclusively instrumental: Pliny's texts have been read, in fact, as a witness to the author's strategic self-fashioning. If this partly new approach has the merit of advancing the critical debate beyond the earlier prevailing interest in his collection as a source of prosopographic evidence, it still insists on casting the epistles as a testimony to the life, however artificially and strategically constructed, of an individual. My work intends to reorient the reading of Pliny's letters by considering them not only as a tool for understanding the author or his times but also as the object to be understood. My central contention is that, while Pliny consciously embeds in his texts the self-portrait of a man of strenuous political activity and incessant cultural commitment, this portrait cannot be separated from the textual corpus that articulates it. Pliny's letters do not merely witness his cultural project; they constitute it.
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- The Art of Pliny's LettersA Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence, pp. viii - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008