The elegiac woman at Rome

Abstract

How do women enter the discourse of Augustan love poetry and become elegiac? Studies of the representation of women in antiquity generally suggest that women enter its literatures doubly determined. Broadly speaking, literary representations of the female are determined both at the level of culture and at the level of genre: that is to say by the range of cultural codes and institutions which order the female in a particular society and by the conventions which surround a particular practice of writing. I propose in this paper, therefore, to explore the place of the elegiac woman in the literary landscape of Augustan Rome through an examination of the interplay of her cultural and generic determinants. The phrase ‘the elegiac woman’ which appears in the title of this paper should make clear at the outset that my concern will be not with the realities of women's lives in Augustan society but with a poetic genre of the female.

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