Books by Evangelos Karakasis

T. Calpurnius Siculus:A Pastoral Poet in Neronian Rome is the first ever detailed examination of the whole of Calpurnius' pastoral corpus in English. It aims to offer an overall picture of Calpurnius' epigonal and generically transcending poetics and meta-poetics through a thorough comparative analysis of the generic interfaces between the bucolic host genre (as bequeathed to Siculus from Theocritus to Vergil) and various generic modes which operate in Calpurnius' eclogues, such as epic, panegyric, elegiac, didactic/georgic. The analysis includes themes/motifs, intertexts and allusion, narrative sequences, diction and metre as well as meta-generic/meta-poetic signs, including Calpurnius' redirection and inversion of the Callimachean-neoteric poetological meta-language. The study's interests also revolve around the ways in which Neronian ideology and imperial politics inform the pastoral narrative and often account for the formalistic change discerned as well as the manner in which Post-Classical diction functions as a targeted, self-conscious linguistic tell-tale of generic evolution. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Roman pastoral and its generic evolution as well as Neronian Literature.

Agonistic or friendly song exchange in idyllic settings forms the very heart of Roman pastoral. It isalso a key means of metapoetic stance-taking on the part of the long line of authors who have cultivated this "e;traditional"e; genre. The present book examines the motif of song exchange in Roman bucolic poetry under this double aspect: as a central theme with established or constantly forming sub-themes and paraphernalia (thus providing a comprehensive listing, description and analysis of such scenes in the totality of Roman literature), and as the locus where, thanks to its very traditionality, innovative generic tendencies are most easily expressed. Starting from Vergil, and continuing with Calpurnius Siculus, the Einsiedeln Eclogues and Nemesianus, the book focuses on how politics, panegyric, elegy, heroic and didactic poetry function as guest genres within the pastoral host genre, by tracing in detail the evolution of a wide variety of literary, linguistic, stylistic and metrical features.