Theocritus and Things : Material Agency in the Idylls by Lilah Grace Canevaro

This book contributes to the literary-theoretical field of Material Ecocriticism, expanding its chronological remit, and is the first to apply it to Classics. Material Ecocriticism has been described as an exercise in listening - and it is to a series of underrepresented agents (women, nature, the nonhuman) in the poetry of Theocritus that this book urges us to listen. This `from below' reading that allows nature and materiality their agency, that sees objects and the labour behind them, gives a new way in to the paradoxes of Hellenistic pastoral poetry: the urban backdrop to bucolic poetry, the artifice of the locus amoenus. This book reveals a detailed picture of material agency and a diverse cast of characters human and nonhuman in Theocritus' Idylls, showing that while the poetry might be paradoxical it is not rarefied. And through a dark-ecological reading it highlights the darkness that undercuts the idyll.
Binding: Paperback / softback