The five studies which make up this book are each built around a theme (representation, essentialism, metaphor, discourse and identification) which I have found useful in organizing my response to the texts of elegy and the types of reading they have recently evoked. Though the studies are nominally separate, key issues will be found to recur again and again. In particular, in a book written for a series entitled ‘Roman Literature and its Contexts’, I have tried to keep in mind the continuing need to examine the question of the historical sitedness of both the texts of elegy and the readings in which their meaning is realized here and now. Each chapter is centred around a reading of a poem or poems together with a discussion of those modern critics who in one way or another have something interesting to say which bears on the ways elegy is currently read. In each case I have tried to press their modes of analysis to see where they may lead, and, equally, where they may show signs of strain.

Acknowledgements