Learned Girls and Male Persuasion Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy [Hardcover]

This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressedthedocta puella,or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writersas plaint and confessionbut rather from the viewpoint of the womenthus as persuasion and attempted manipulationJames reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.

Sharon L. Jamesis Associate Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

James shapes a new and original understanding of elegy. The author's agenda of foregrounding the viewpoint of thedocta puellashould stimulate major changes in the way that these poems are studied. Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park

James provides a highly original reading of the elegiac genre. Her use of thedocta puellaas the focalizing point of her reading provides new insight into its fundamental nature&. The book would serve as an excellent introduction to the genre for undergraduates. Paul Allen Miller, author ofLatin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader

Learned Girls and Male Persuasionshould be required reading for anyone teaching or studying the elegists. . . . [Sharon James] views the genre in the light of social reality, showing us what is ubiquitous and obvious in the poems if we take off the rose-colored glasses of romantic idealism: the facts of violence, rape, and abortion, and, above all, the fundamental tension between the erotic demands of the lover and the economic needs of the puella. Elegy will never be the same again. Julia Gaisser, author ofCatullus and his Renaissance Readers