Book,
Work in Progress. Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome
Oxford University Press, Oxford, (2011)
Abstract
This book offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and strategies of self-representation among Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also offers discussions of earlier Greek material, including Isocrates, Plato, and Hellenistic poetry. The book argues that revision made textuality into a medium of social exchange. Revisions were not always made by authors working alone; often, they were the result of conversations between an author and friends or literary contacts, and these conversations exemplified a commitment to collective debate and active collaboration. Revision was thus much more than an unavoidable element in literary genesis: it was one way in which authorship became a form of social agency. Consequently, when we think about revision for authors of the late republic and early empire we should not think solely of painstaking attendance to craft aimed exclusively at the perfection of a literary work. Nor should we think of the resulting texts as closed and invariant statements sent from an author to his reader. So long as an author was still willing to revise, his text served as a temporary platform around and in which a community came into being. Much more was at stake than the text itself: like all communities, such textual communities were subject to imbalances and differentiation in taste, ideology, capability and willingness to participate, and above all power, the ability to propose and enforce a specific set of textual choices.
