In the Flesh: Embodied Identities in Roman Elegy

Description

In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change. Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at the margins of this poetic discourse—mistresses, rivals, enslaved characters, overlooked members of households—their own identities, even when they do not speak. She demonstrates how the three poets create a prominent aesthetic of corporeal abjection and imperfection, associating the body as much with blood, wounds, and corporeal disintegration as with elegance, refinement, and sensuality. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Embodied Selves and the Body in Elegy Part 1: Our Bodies, Ourselves 1. Embodied Identity and the Scripta Puella in Propertius 2. Tibullan Embodiments: Slaves, Soldiers, and the Body as Costume 3. The Body in Bad Faith: Gender and Embodiment in the Amores Part 2: Blood, Sex, and Tears: Problems of Embodiment in Roman Elegy 4. Naked Selves: Sex, Violence, and Embodied Identities 5. Body Talk: Cynthia Speaks 6. Not the Elegiac Ideal: Gendering Blood, Wounds, and Gore in Roman Love Elegy Conclusion Notes References Index Locorum Index