Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship

Scholars in modern languages and literatures have enthusiastically embraced the use of the "personal voice", the explicitly autobiographical performance within the act of criticism. However on both sides of the Atlantic, venerable traditions of Classical scholarship, among them, unusually rigid taboos against speaking of oneself in print, have deterred classicists at the earlier stages of their careers from engaging in serious self-reflection as they offer new interpretations of ancient Greek and Roman texts and thought. Indebted to the insights of feminist and post-structuralist writing, the use of the personal voice challenges the traditional notion of the objective critic who analyzes texts from a disinterested and universally relevant perspective.Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarshipis the first collection of theoretically informed autobiographical writing in the field of classical studies. An intellectual debate involving both American and Britishclassicists, its contributors represent a wide range of academic institutions, areas of specialization and theoretical approaches. All, however, share the goal of creating a more expansive and authoritative form of classical scholarship which acknowledges distinctive differences amongst its practitioners as vital sources of strength.