FEELING HISTORY

“This book is a well-researched discussion of Lucan’s extremely challenging poem on the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey. Working from a fine-grained analysis of one formal aspect of the poem, Lucan’s use of the literary trope of apostrophe, the author goes on to investigate what the use of apostrophe might indicate about the philosophical outlook of Lucan’s dark picture of the Civil War and the Empire that grew out of it.” —Catherine Connors, University of Washington

Francesca D’Alessandro Behr is associate professor of classics and Italian studies at the University of Houston.

FeelingHistory is a study of apostrophe (i.e., the rhetorical device in which the narrator talks directly to his characters) in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Through the narrator’s direct addresses, irony, and grotesque imagery, Lucan appears not as a nihilist, but as a character deeply concerned about ethics. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how Lucan’s style represents a criticism of the Roman approach to history, epic, ethics, and aesthetics. The book’s chief interest lies in the ethical and moral stance that the poet-narrator takes toward his characters and his audience. To this end, Francesca D’Alessandro Behr studies the ways in which the narrator communicates ethical and moral judgments. Lucan’s retelling of this central historical epic triggers in the mind of the reader questions about the validity of the Roman imperial project as a whole.