Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace by S. J. Harrison

410 PHOENIX invocation which later developments throw into question (one could indeed say the same about the invocation of the semi-divine heroes at Catullus 64.42-43). He feels that the biographical explanationbywhich Lucan changes his view over time afterquarrelling withNero isunsatisfying, but it isplausible for many. Overall, he providesan excellent discussion of themost important Lucan scholarshipof the last twenty years, finding Masters's link between the powerful actor Caesar and the creating poet Lucan especially attractive. In sum,thisbookwill be key readingforscholarsand students of thesetexts. As usual inO'Hara's work, we find rewarding, well-documented, and well-focused analyses which are not afraid to attack some fundamental and long-debated issues, and all will benefit from his keen intelligence, clear arguments, and instinct for the central points at stake in the interpretation of the works treated. Corpus Christi College, Oxford S. J.Harrison Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace. By S. J.Harrison Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. Pp. viii,262. Stephen Harrison is an extraordinarily productive scholar, with a genuine concern for what students and their teachers actually need: hence, besides his scholarly work on Apuleius,1 he has tackled the comprehensivetaskof editing A Companion to Latin Literature (Maiden,MA 1999) and given us an abundance of tools for the study ofVergil andHorace. For Vergil alone, besides the scholarlycommentary on Book 10 (Oxford1990), he has editedOxford Readings intheAeneid(Oxford1995) and a collection of Gian Biagio Conte's papers on the Aeneid, The Poetry of Pathos (Oxford 2006). But his heart is probably with Horace: some substantial critical pieces on specific odes, the bimillennial colloquium and volumeHomage toHorace (Oxford 1995), and now The Cambridge Companion to Horace. The work under review, dedicated to his deceased teacher Oliver Lyne, focuses on the same formative period inHorace's career as Lyne's Horace: The PublicPoetry(Oxford1995). Essentially, Harrison is arguing that the poetry of both Vergil and Horace between 39 and 19 b.c.e. owes much of its -depth to a conscious supplementation of the poem's or poetry book's declared genre by elements drawn from markedly distinct genres. An opening chapter is devoted to identifying genre and genres fromdifferent approaches. Harrison is fundamentally Aristotelian,defininggenre by form (e.g.,metre) andmode (narrative or dialogic) but he takes intoaccounthalf a dozen modern (orfairly modern) theorists: Wellek andWarren, Alistair Fowler, Bloom, Genette, Jauss, Todorow, Derrida. The approach is systematic, almostpedagogic, and thebook does not subsequendy make much use of the modern comparanda. I toohave found ithard to applytoclassicalpoetry theapproachesofmodern literary theorists whose focus is reallythenovel. By theend of thediscussion Harrison has setup someusefulterms, defining genres (22) by theirformal repertoire (technical features associated by readers with the genre); thematic repertoire; and metageneric signals (direct statements recognizable by readers "which specifically raise the issue ofwhich literary kinds a text might belong to"). Key to his approach ishis 1S. Harrison, Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford 2000), translations from Apuleius' rhetorical works (Oxford 2001), and Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel (Oxford 1999). BOOKREVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 411 distinction between "host" and "guest" genres, and he shows us his poetic heroes not only givinghospitalityto theseguestsbut alsobuildingon each other's work. Successive chaptersdeal with theEclogues (ChapterTwo), Horace's SatiresBook 1 (Chapter Three) andEpodes (ChapterFour), theGeorgics(ChapterFive), OdesBooks 1-3 (ChapterSix), and the Aeneid (ChapterSeven).A dividendfromthisquasi-chronological alternation between the two poets and friends are observations of influence passing from one to theother,but I confessthatI foundtheoveralleffect of thissequence tobe one of diminishingcredibility andutility. Thus thediscussions in"beyond Pastoral"workedwell, becausewe could compareVergilwith a solidbody ofpoems of equal scale,Theocritus' countryIdylls. Pastoral is highlydistinctive,automaticallysignalledby its settingand personae, and Harrison offers useful discussion of the exceptional poems 4, 6, and 10, marked by theirechoesofprophecy(4), their hellenistic mini-narratives andDichterweihe (6; the suggestionofParthenius as theunacknowledgedfatherof the earlytales isvery attractive), and the clash of elegiac and pastoral attitudes in 10. But these poems are surely more instances of a foreign take-over than a merger. The notionofhostgenres is more problematicfortheSatires, which fromtheirorigin in Lucilius were a miscellany, often deriving their nature from burlesques of epic (or tragedy?at least tragic diction). How can any elements be treated as alien guests of such a hybrid?And...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.