The Poetics of Power: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography by Nandini B. Pandey (review)

For Pandey, imperial authority is not simply imposed by a unified, top-down master plan to orchestrate public perceptions; it also depends on critical affective roles of the populace/audience that determine meanings and delegate power. There is also an astute nod to the phenomenon of 21st-century fa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Classical world 2020, Vol.113 (2), p.228-229
Main Author: Cole, Spencer
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Audiences
Culture
Iconography
Poetics
Poetry
Power
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:For Pandey, imperial authority is not simply imposed by a unified, top-down master plan to orchestrate public perceptions; it also depends on critical affective roles of the populace/audience that determine meanings and delegate power. There is also an astute nod to the phenomenon of 21st-century fandom and its decentralized, social-media powered "participatory culture," although conceiving of ancient Roman social communication as a "bottom-up, largely unregulated process of distributed content creation by individuals from all rungs of society" (10) may be an anachronistic overcorrection of the top-down model that this book interrogates. The Aeneid plays a big part in this book: discussions of "internal audiences" that figure readers as co-viewers in the poem, especially with Aeneas as a responsive observer of Augustan images in the underworld (book 6) and the shield ekphrasis (book 8), enhance the overall argument.
ISSN:0009-8418
1558-9234
1558-9234
DOI:10.1353/clw.2020.0012