Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Textual criticism in a post-heroic age; 2. The rhetoric of textual criticism/textual criticism as rhetoric; 3. Establishing the text 1: recension; 4. Establishing the text 2: conjecture; 5. Establishing the text 3: interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality; 6. Textual criticism and literary criticism: the case of Propertius; 7. Presenting the text: the critical edition and its discontents; 8. The future: problems and prospects; Appendix: reading a critical apparatus.

Promotional Information

A critical reassessment of the methods of Latin textual criticism and editing, in a form accessible to non-specialists.

About the Author

Richard Tarrant is Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Harvard University. He has long been interested in issues of editing classical texts, and has produced editions of two tragedies by Seneca (Agamemnon and Thyestes) and edited Ovid's Metamorphoses for the Oxford Classical Texts series. His most recent book, a commentary on Virgil, Aeneid Book XII, published in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, has received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies and the Premio Internazionale 'Virgilio' from the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantova.

Reviews

'… this is an excellent book both in itself and because it puts so many things into question. It paves the way for a huge improvement in the editing of classical texts.' Franz Dolveck, École française de Rome