Intercepted Letters Epistolary and Narrative in Greek and Roman Literature

"Intercepted Letters examines the phenomenon of epistolarity within a range of classical Greek and Roman texts, with a focus on letters as symbols for larger, culturally constructed processes of reading, writing, and interpretation. In addition, this work analyzes how the epistolary form occasionally problematizes the introduction of the technology of writing into cultures already heavily implicated in the authority of the spoken or sung word. The methods of intertextuality and reader-response theory that have so revolutionized other aspects of classical scholarship have not, in the main, been applied to epistolarity studies. Studies of epistolarity have instead tended to focus on individual collections - Cicero's letters, Pliny's letters, or Plato's letters. Epistolarity that occurs in larger narrative contexts remains undertheorized." "In Intercepted Letters, Thomas E. Jenkins argues that epistolarity has certain formal features that can be found even outside of epistolary collections - the problematics of communication, an emphasis on authorial absence, a hypersensitivity to interpretation, and an implicit focus on power. Jenkins thus examines a number of epistolary tropes - in authors as wide-ranging as Euripides, Ovid, and those of the Historia Augusta - as he argues for the importance of epistolarity in analyzing the poetics of reading in the ancient world."--BOOK JACKET.

Thomas E. Jenkins is Assistant Professor at Trinity University.