Böcker av William Fitzgerald

In an age of sound bite, what sort of author could be relevant than a master of epigram? Martial, the influential epigrammatist of classical antiquity, was just such a virtuoso of form, but despite his pertinence to culture, his work has been neglected. This book provides an insightful tour of his works, shedding light on Roman poet's world.

Explores prayer as a rhetorical art, examining situations, strategies, and performative modes of discourse directed to the divine.

This is a book about poetry, language, and classical antiquity, and explains to the reader with little or no Latin how the language works as a unique vehicle for poetic expression. Fitzgerald guides the reader through samples of Latin poetry to give a sense of how the individual poems feel in Latin and what makes Latin poetry worth reading.

This book explores the presence of slaves and slavery in Roman literature and asks particularly what the free imagination made of the experience of living with slaves, beings who both were and were not fellow humans. As a shadow humanity, slaves furnished the free with other selves and imaginative alibis as well as mediators between and substitutes for their peers. As presences that witnessed their owners' most unguarded moments they possessed a knowledge that was the object of both curiosity and anxiety. The book discusses not only the ideological relations of Roman literature to the institution of slavery, but also the ways in which slavery provided a metaphor for a range of other relationships and experiences, and in particular for literature itself. It is arranged thematically and covers a broad chronological and generic field.

This text argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. It shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license.