The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome

Brings together environmental literary criticism and classics, generating new readings of foundational works of Augustan literature as environmental poetry. For classicists, it discloses new aspects of familiar texts, while for environmental literary critics it deepens and complicates the traditions and concepts of environmental literature.

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This book reveals central texts of Augustan poetry-Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, and Horace's Odes-to be environmental poetry. In contrast to readings that assume forms of nature poetry are mere Romantic projections, that suggest Roman authors did not care about the environment, or that relegate place to the status of background and setting, it uses both ecocritical theory and close, contextualized readings to show how Horace and Vergil make issues of place, environment, and ecology central to their poetry. As the book argues, each work also creates a distinctive environmental poetics, in which the nonhuman world and particular local environments help shape the specific qualities of its poetry. By attending to the environmental and place-based poetics of these works, the book generates new readings of Vergil and Horace while deepening and complicating how we understand the traditions and concepts of environmental literature.