The Pharsalia Essay

Lucan
This Study Guide consists of approximately 88 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Pharsalia.

The Pharsalia Essay

Lucan
This Study Guide consists of approximately 88 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Pharsalia.
This section contains 920 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Pharsalia Study Guide

Author Shadi Bartsch discusses the importance of Lucan's major themes in this excerpt.

The previous two chapters have presented the grounds for a grippingly negative interpretation of the Civil War. This reading has had a powerful pull for recent readers of the epic; indeed, the present critical climate has rendered it one of the most compelling positions on the poem. The collapse of the autonomous individual amid the wreck of linguistic systems and subject-object relations, the hopelessness of meaningful narrative in a meaningless world, the impossibility of representing the trauma of Romans killing Romans—"Shun this part of the war, O mind, and leave it in darkness, and let no time learn of such evils from my poetry, that so great is the license granted to civil war"—all these are undeniable aspects of Lucan's epic world, and for readers of our times I think they are...

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This section contains 920 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Pharsalia Study Guide
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Gale
The Pharsalia from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.