The Rapes Of Lucretia: A Myth And Its Transformations
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Some stains on interior front pages - not obscuring text. Small chips on spine.
Few stories have haunted the Western imagination as persistently as the tale of Lucretia — the virtuous Roman noblewoman whose violation by Sextus Tarquinius ignited a revolution, toppled a dynasty, and became one of antiquity's most enduring moral parables. Ian Donaldson's The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations traces the remarkable journey of this ancient narrative across more than two millennia of literature, art, and political thought, charting how successive ages have reinterpreted, contested, and reimagined its central themes of honour, shame, violence, and female virtue. From Livy and Ovid through Shakespeare's poem, to the operas of Britten and beyond, Donaldson presents a panoramic survey of the myth's extraordinary cultural afterlife, illuminating the ways in which each retelling reveals as much about its own era as it does about Rome. Donaldson's scholarship is rigorous yet compellingly readable, arguing that the Lucretia myth functions as a kind of cultural mirror — one that reflects shifting attitudes toward gender, political power, and moral responsibility across the centuries. His analysis uncovers the deep tensions embedded within the story: Is Lucretia a tragic heroine or a victim of patriarchal ideology? A symbol of republican virtue or an emblem of female subjugation? Written with elegant precision and wide-ranging erudition, this landmark work of comparative literature raises questions that remain as urgent and unsettling today as they were in ancient Rome.
Author: Ian Donaldson
Format: Hardback
Published: 1982, Clarendon Press, Oxford
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Some stains on interior front pages - not obscuring text. Small chips on spine.
Few stories have haunted the Western imagination as persistently as the tale of Lucretia — the virtuous Roman noblewoman whose violation by Sextus Tarquinius ignited a revolution, toppled a dynasty, and became one of antiquity's most enduring moral parables. Ian Donaldson's The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations traces the remarkable journey of this ancient narrative across more than two millennia of literature, art, and political thought, charting how successive ages have reinterpreted, contested, and reimagined its central themes of honour, shame, violence, and female virtue. From Livy and Ovid through Shakespeare's poem, to the operas of Britten and beyond, Donaldson presents a panoramic survey of the myth's extraordinary cultural afterlife, illuminating the ways in which each retelling reveals as much about its own era as it does about Rome. Donaldson's scholarship is rigorous yet compellingly readable, arguing that the Lucretia myth functions as a kind of cultural mirror — one that reflects shifting attitudes toward gender, political power, and moral responsibility across the centuries. His analysis uncovers the deep tensions embedded within the story: Is Lucretia a tragic heroine or a victim of patriarchal ideology? A symbol of republican virtue or an emblem of female subjugation? Written with elegant precision and wide-ranging erudition, this landmark work of comparative literature raises questions that remain as urgent and unsettling today as they were in ancient Rome.