Maticic, Del (2022) Raw Materiality in Augustan Literature. UNSPECIFIED.
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Text (Dissertation)
MaticicD-RawMateriality-diss-NY-2022.pdf - Published Version Restricted to RUG campus Download (2MB) |
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of raw materiality in Augustan literature. Though wood, metal, stone, ivory, and other substances have been extensively studied by Romanists, they have for the most part been treated independently of one another as literary symbols and commodities, and in the few instances in which they have been studied as raw materials, it is most often concluded that they are above all metapoetic symbols of the passive and formless subject matter transformed by the poets. But as I demonstrate, this emphasis on metapoetics has led scholars to miss how the raw material functions to connect humans and the physical world. I demonstrate this through close readings and analyses influenced by a range of contemporary theories from New Materialism and Actor Network Theory to Ecocriticism and Energy Studies. This reorientation does more than move Latin literary study further past its enduring obsession with intertextuality and formalism: it opens ancient Rome to new kinds of environmentalist and globalizing readings. I consider the entanglement of the raw material in a broader sphere of the human condition. As I argue in Chapter 2, pastoral plants outgrow metapoetic symbolism in elegy and pastoral, as when the white alder at the end of Eclogue 10 sprouts shoots from its base, effectively taking up space formerly reserved for tuneful otium. Chapter 3 turns from poems to bodies, and demonstrates how, across the different genres of Augustan literature, human corpora are similarly enmeshed in webs of raw material transformation and energy transfer. These webs constitute an ecology of raw materials that enables us to think comparatively about human-plant-animal encounters in figures as diverse as Vergil’s Mezentius and the garlanded ego of Horace’s ode. Finally, as I argue in Chapter 4, this material ecology also shapes conceptualizations of world, as raw materials that compose cosmic artworks like the Shield of Aeneas are not merely metaphors for undifferentiated chaos but are also commodities sourced from the very globe represented on the artwork.
| Item Type: | Thesis (UNSPECIFIED) |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | dissertation, Literature, raw materials, Augustan period |
| Status: | Published |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | dissertation, Literature, raw materials, Augustan period |
| Date Deposited: | 29 Sep 2025 07:58 |
| Last Modified: | 29 Sep 2025 07:58 |
| URI: | https://ebooks.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/419 |
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