Books by Shadi Bartsch

Is Lucan's brilliant and grotesque epic Civil War an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that despairingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers a startlingly new answer to this split debate on the Roman poet's magnum opus.

People in the ancient world thought of vision as an ethical tool and a tactile sense. Gazing upon someone was treated as a path to philosophical self-knowledge, but the question of tactility also introduced an erotic element. This title asserts that these links among vision, sexuality, and self-knowledge are key to the understanding of the self.