Redressing Elegy'sPuella: Propertius IV and the Rhetoric of Fashion

Abstract

Much recent criticism of Roman love elegy, especially Propertian love elegy, has been concerned with the exposure of elegy'segoandpuellaas poetic constructions whose ‘partially realistic’ characteristics and actions serve as metaphorical representations of the poet's writing practice and poetic ideals. As Duncan Kennedy has pointed out, however, this discourse of representation has already threatened to create its own limitations of applicability, as it privileges the ‘partial realism’ of love elegy's first-person narratives, in which an authorial male narrator (ego) writes of his female subject (puella), at the expense of the more openly unrealistic representational strategies of works such as Ovid'sHeroides and Fastior, the more immediate concern of this article, the fourth book of Propertius' elegies.

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