This volume investigates an important and surprisingly widespread phenomenon in Latin literature, which has to date received little sustained discussion the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who in fact hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position. Though often associated with the markers of imperial hegemony and elite speech, Latin literature evinces a remarkably broad range of strategies designed to enable the adoption of a markedly disempowered voice from topoi such as recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in statusconforming, superior genres) and rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia (artfully and strategically adopting a persona to garner favour, even when this means temporarily forfeiting ones higher status and discursive privileges), to the longsilenced female heroines of Ovids Heroides and satires irreverent take on the great and the good by framing its narratives as being articulated from below. Even largescale cultural selfpositionings fall within this scope, be they expressions of Roman cultural inferiority visvis classical Greece or the tensions that arise between humble (yet spiritually superior) Christian writers and their grand, canonical, and classical (yet pagan) predecessors. The intersecting case studies offered in Complex Inferiorities examine this phenomenon in a wide range of genres, periods, and authors. By demonstrating that renegotiating alleged weakness constitutes a central activity in Latin...

Binding: Hardcover;336 pages; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Classification: DSBB; Weight: 656 g; Dimensions: 147 x 222 x 30

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