The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. The Poetics of Late Latin Literature attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.

TABLE OF CONTENTSList of ContributorsINTRODUCTION:NOTES TOWARDS A POETICS OF LATE ANTIQUE LITERATUREby Jas Elsner (University of Oxford)and Jesús Hernández Lobato (University of Salamanca)1.THE EXPLOSION OF FORM:LATE ANTIQUE EXPERIMENTALISM1. Michael Squire (King's College London): "POP Art: The Optical Poetics of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius"2. Franca Ela Consolino (University of L'Aquilla): "Polymetry in Late Latin Poems: Some Observations on its Meaning and Functions"3. Isabella Gualandri (University of Milan): "Words Pregnant with Meaning: the Power of Single Words in Late Latin Literature"2.LATE ANTIQUE INTERTEXTUALITY4. Helen Kaufmann (University of Oxford): "Intertextuality in Late Latin Poetry"5. Ja? Elsner (University of Oxford): "Caught in the Image: The Narcissus Cento and Late Latin Poetics"3.PROGRAMMATIC REFLECTIONS:A METALITERARY TWIST6. Marco Formisano (University of Ghent): "Displacing Tradition: A New-Allegorical Reading of Ausonius, Claudian and Rutilius Namatianus"7. Stephen Harrison (University of Oxford): "Metapoetics in the Prefaces of Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae"8. Scott McGill (Rice University): "Rewriting Ausonius"9. Jesús Hernández Lobato (University of Salamanca): "To Speak or Not to Speak: The Birth of a 'Poetics of Silence' in Late Antique Literature"4.LITERATURE AND POWER10. Roger Rees (University of St Andrews): "The Poetics of Latin Prose Praise and the Fourth Century Curve"11. Catherine Ware (University College Cork): "The Lies the Poets Tell: Poetry in Prose Panegyrics"5.A NEW LITERARY SPACE:THE CHALLENGES OF CHRISTIAN POETRY12. Michael Roberts (Wesleyan University): "Lactantius' Phoenix and Late Latin Poetics"13. Marc Mastrangelo (Dickinson College): "Early Christian Response to Platonist Poetics: Boethius, Prudentius, and the Poeta Theologus"14. Gillian Clark (University of Bristol): "In Praise of the Wax Candle: Augustine the Poet and Late Latin Literature"BibliographyIndex