Buch, Englisch, 342 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 678 g
Buch, Englisch, 342 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 678 g
ISBN: 978-0-19-923668-8
Verlag: ACADEMIC
The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This volume joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil's plants and trees to reveal how fundamental they are to an understanding of the poet's outlook on religion, culture, and mankind's place within the world.
Divided into two parts, the first explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil's plants, from awe-inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, and shows how both cultivated and uncultivated plants fit within and help to shape the complex landscape of Vergilian (and, more broadly, Roman) religious thought. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts towards human interactions with plants from the perspectives of both cultivation and relaxation, exploring the love-hate relationship with vegetation which sometimes supports and sometimes contests the human self-image as the world's dominant species. Combining a series of close readings of a wide range of passages with the identification of broader patterns of association, Vergil's Green Thoughts appositely reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
- 0: Introduction
- 0.1. Ancient botany and ways of seeing plants
- 0.1.1. Definitions of nature
- 0.2. Humans and plants: from anthropocentrism to ecocriticism
- 0.2.1. Plants and an anthropocentric world-view
- 0.2.2. Ancient environmentalisma
- 0.2.3. Ecocriticism and ancient literature
- 0.3. Gods and plants
- 0.3.1. Approaches to numen
- 0.3.2. Plants and everyday religion
- 0.3.3. Forms of association: nymphs and trees
- 0.4. Plants as symbol and metaphor
- 0.4.1. Plants, people, and analogy
- 0.4.2. Plants and politics
- 0.5. Poetic plants
- 0.5.1. Poetic plants before and beside Vergil
- 0.5.2. Plants and poetics in Vergil (a glimpse of a road not much taken)
- I: Numen
- I: Numinous Habitats
- I.1. Forests and woodland areas (silua, saltus, nemus, lucus)
- I.1.1. Backgrounds
- I.1.2. Habitarunt di quoque siluas: gods and woods in the Eclogues
- I.1.3. Present and absent numen in the woods of the Georgics
- I.1.4. Religio dira loci: the Aeneid's woodland numen
- I.1.4.1. Underworld woods: numen and confusion
- I.1.4.2. Echoes of the underworld: Aeaea, Tiber, Albunea, Amsanctus
- I.1.4.3. Woodland numen and the city
- I.2. Numen and plants in cultivated land: fields, meadows, plantations, and gardens (ager, aruus, campus, nouale /-is, pratum, rus, seges, arbusta, hortus)
- I.2.1. Expected and unexpected agricultural divinity in the Eclogues and Aeneid
- I.2.2. Ceres, Bacchus, corn, and vines in the Georgics
- I.2.3. Plants and divine metonymy
- II: Gods' Special Species
- II.1. Oak (aesculus, quercus, robur, and ilex)
- II.1.1. The oak transformed: votive tree and trophy
- II.2. Poplar (populus)
- II.3. Pine (pinus, picea)
- II.4. Olive and wild olive (oliua, oleaster)
- II.5. Laurel / bay (laurus)
- II.6. Myrtle (myrtus)
- II.7. Cypress (cupressus, cyparissus)
- II.8. Ivy (hedera)
- II.9. The borderline divine: magical and medicinal plants
- II: Homo
- III: Tame Plants
- III.1. Symbiosis
- III.1.1. Harmonious work in the Eclogues
- III.1.2. The locus amoenus and other harmonious habitats
- III.1.3. Grain and other field crops: shared endeavour and shared suffering
- III.1.4. Useful trees
- III.1.4.1. Useful trees and the exotic
- III.1.5. Productivity at a price: the vine
- III.2. Conflict
- III.2.1. Too much of a good thinga Farming as restraint of nature
- III.2.2. Farming as violence
- III.2.2.1. Vines and violence
- III.2.2.2. Grafting: art or abusea
- III.2.2.3. Cultivation and violence: metaphor in reverse
- IV: Wild Plants
- IV.1. Defining the wild
- IV.1.1. Flowers: wild yet tame, tame yet wild
- IV.1.1.1. Flowers and bees
- IV.1.1.2. Flowers and people: beauty, sex, and death
- IV.1.2. Wildness and spontaneous production in trees
- IV.1.3. Degeneration and degeneracy
- IV.2. Weeds
- IV.2.1. Weeds and further questions of definition
- IV.2.2. Characterizing weeds
- IV.2.3. Intermediate weeds
- IV.2.4. Crossing (and making) boundaries with brambles
- IV.2.5. Grass: from harmony to danger
- IV.3. Fighting and felling: a coda
- V: Conclusions
- Endmatter
- Works cited
- Index of plants
- Index of passages discussed
- General index
