The politics and poetics of Cicero's Brutus : the invention of literary history /
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| Author / Creator: | Van den Berg, Christopher Sean, author. |
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| Imprint: | Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. ©2021 |
| Description: | xiii, 290 pages ; 24 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | |
| Format: | Print Book |
| URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12691193 |
| Summary: | Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day. |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 290 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781108495950 1108495958 9781108811354 1108811353 9781108856447 9781108856980 |
