Cultivating the muse : struggles for power and inspiration in classical literature
"Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vital forms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists - or victims - in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fates and explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome."--Jacket
Kongress Oxford 1996
viii, 312 pages ; 23 cm
9780199240043, 0199240043
47939912
Introduction: secularizing the muse / Efrossini Spentzou
Plato's muses: the goddesses that endure / Penelope Murray
The envied muse: Plato versus Homer / Adriana Cavarero
Reinscribing the muse: Greek drama and the discourse of inspired creativity / Ismene Lada-Richards
Stealing Apollo's lyre: muses and poetic [Greek] in Apollonius' Argonautica 3 / Efrossini Spentzou
Authority and ontology of the muses in epic reception / Andrew Laird
Masculinity under threat? The poetics and politics of inspiration in Latin poetry / Don Fowler
The untouched self: Sapphic and Catullan muses in Horace, Odes 1.22 / Ronnie Ancona
The muse unruly and dead: Acanthis in Propertius 4.5 / Micaela Janan
An a-musing tale: gender, genre, and Ovid's battles with inspiration in the Metamorphoses / Alison Sharrock
Muse and power in the poetry of Statius / Gianpiero Rosati
Corny copa: the motel muse / John Henderson
Includes papers from the conference Cultivating the Muse : Power, Desire and Inspiration in the Classical World, held 4 May 1996 at Wolfson College, Oxford
English text with passages in Greek and Latin