A Reader's Dialogues. Discussing Latin Literature of the First Century through Modernism (2024)

J. Elsner and J. Hernández Lobato (eds.), The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.

The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element—the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. This book attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.

Classical Review, 2019

Foreword to Literary language and its public in late Latin antiquity and the Middle Ages

Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 1993

In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his Mimesis: the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism.

Review of J. Elsner and J. Hernández Lobato (eds.), The poetics of late Latin literature (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Classical Review, 2019

Literature, History, Periodization, and the Pleasures of the Latin Literary History of Late Antiquity

History Compass, 2009

(with J. Elsner), "Introduction: Notes towards a Poetics of Late Antique Literature", in J. Elsner and J. Hernández Lobato (eds.), The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, 1-22.

The introduction to this volume addresses three main issues. First, it provides a critical a reassessment of the discipline of late antique studies, going back to its very foundations and revealing its historical, cultural and political biases. Secondly, it presents and discusses the aesthetic/poetic paradigm of late antique literature and art proposed by the editors, thus setting forth the conceptual frame underlying the whole volume. To this end, notions like metaliterary twist, hybridization, poetics of the uncommon, culture of spolia, appropriationism, era of interpretation, cumulative aesthetics, poetics of the fragment/detail, etc. are briefly explained and discussed with the aid a number of representative examples. Last but not least, it explores the intriguing topicality of late antique culture in its problematic relationship to postmodern world. As usual in these pieces, the introduction also presents and justifies the volume’s aim and structure, as well as the main topics discussed by the different contributors.

Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception

eds. Tom Geue and Elena Giusti, Cambridge University Press, 2021

Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which functions as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of these texts. Reviewing and working with various influential approaches to textual absence, the contributors to Unspoken Rome treat these texts as silent types, listening out for what they do not say, and how they do not speak, whilst also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built.

Ja? Elsner - Jesús Hernández Lobato (edd.), The Poetics of Late Latin Literature. Oxford studies in late antiquity, New York: Oxford University Press, viii+534 pp. $85.00, ISBN 978-0-19-935563-1

Exemplaria Classica

Introduction: Life, Love and Death in Latin Poetry, Series:Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 61

Literature as an Artefact of Jouissance, Sempiternity, and Reflection: A Diachronic Study