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Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire interprets Aulus Gellius' second-century text, the
Noctes Atticae, as a fundamentally literary collection that offers a profound meditation on the experience of reading and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire. Incorporating textual analysis alongside narratology-informed approaches, Scott J. DiGiulio investigates the strategies used by Gellius to innovate within the Latin literary tradition and provides a framework for interpreting this text's perceived disorder on its own terms.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Ways of Reading and the Miscellanistic Project
- Chapter 1: Reading the NA through the Latin Literary Past: Gellius and the Imperial Prose Tradition
- Chapter 2: Approaching a Miscellanistic Work from the Outside In: Paratextual Strategies
- Chapter 3: Prescribing a Way of Reading: Gellius' Preface as Critical Model
- Chapter 4: Confronting Variety in the NA: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Chapter 5: The Poetics of Prose: Gellius, Alexandrianism, and the Composed Book
- Chapter 6: How to Read a Book: NA Book 3
- Chapter 7: Approaches to Reading Miscellanistic Aesthetics from Late Antiquity to Today
- References
About the author
Scott DiGiulio is Associate Professor of Classics and Senior Research Associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University. He is the co-editor of Documentality: New Approaches to Documents in the Roman Empire.
Additional text
There may be no more important work of Latin literature for understanding reading in the Roman principate, and no Roman work itself more challenging to really read, than Gellius' Noctes Atticae. But modern readers certainly could ask for no finer guide through both projects than Scott J. DiGiulio's Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire. DiGiulio shows how a work still seen as esoteric and eccentric within the Roman canon is in fact both revealing of and a reflection on the underlying dynamics of Latin literature in this period. Through his lucid analysis we learn how miscellany was an engine of critical inquiry and innovation for ancient Romans and can be--in the hands of a talented critic--one for modern readers as well.
