Poetic Play with Sex and Gender
Poetic Play with Sex and Gender
This chapter examines selected instances of grammatical gender-bending that occur in extant poetic texts, for most of which instances scholars both ancient and modern have largely chosen not to offer explanations. The passages chosen are meant to demonstrate the potential range of approaches that the poets could apply to the manipulation of grammatical gender. The chapter begins with a survey of visual evidence from antiquity to demonstrate that, with only apparent exceptions, personifications in ancient Rome are depicted with the sex that corresponds to the grammatical gender of the noun that describes them. It then considers poetic texts that provide various examples in which a poet plays with the notion of personification through the exploitation of a noun's gender. It concludes with an analysis of Catullus 6, where sensitivity to grammatical gender contributes to the riddling nature of the poem.
Keywords: poets, grammatical gender, personification, ancient Rome, sex, gender, Catullus 6
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
