Virgil's pathetic style

Thesis

Although it is a well-established insight of Virgilian criticism that Virgil’s poetry is a ‘poetry of pathos’, we still lack a comprehensive monograph on Virgil’s pathetic style, namely the set of textual strategies that the poet systematically employs to elicit the reader’s emotional response.

This thesis, which aims at filling this gap, is divided into a methodological premise and four chapters, that discuss the different modalities through which pathos is constructed.

In the first chapter the reader is provided with a panorama on the textual strategies of ‘pathetic expressiveness’, those forms of expression which are evidently appropriate to elicit the reader’s emotional response. The final section is an analysis of the pathetic motifs of the Aeneid with a lexical investigation on ‘words of pathos’, the key terms of pathos that set the emotional tone of a passage.

The second chapter examines ‘pathetic realism’, namely the moving description of everyday life and domesticity disrupted by the violence of History. The third chapter focusses on Virgilian ‘expressionism’, a form of extreme realism which selects the most abnormal aspects of reality (gruesome description of wounds, copiously spilled blood, and nightmarish scenes) as subjectively filtered by the narrator’s hallucinatory gaze, with the effect of striking the reader’s sensibility.

The last chapter is devoted to Virgil’s ‘cinematic’ technique. Virgil’s art not only rivals painting, but in many cases, can be compared, for its immersive force, to cinema: ‘close-up’, ‘slow-motion’, ‘flashback’, ‘visible montage’ are all terms that aptly describe many pathetic scenes in the Aeneid.

Authors: Dainotti, P

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jnadomq8r
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: pathos; stylistics; expressiveness; Virgil
• Subjects: Language and languages--Style