Catullan Provocations

Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position

William Fitzgerald

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520200623
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520924093
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relation to the drama of position played out between poet, poem, and reader, the author produces a fresh interpretation of almost all of Catullus's oeuvre. Running through the book is an analysis of the ideological stakes behind the construction of the author Catullus in twentieth-century scholarship and of the agenda governing the interpreter's position in relation to Catullus.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER I. The Collection and Its Author
• CHAPTER 2. Catullus and the Reader
• CHAPTER 3. Obscenity Figures
• CHAPTER 4. Urbanity
• CHAPTER 5. The Wronged Lover and the Poet’s Isolation
• CHAPTER 6. Gazing at the Golden Age
• CHAPTER 7. The Ruse of the Victim
• CHAPTER 8. The Death of a Brother
• CHAPTER 9. Between Men
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Catullun Poems Cited