The elegists, ancient Rome’s most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Dream, Fantasy, and Visual Art in Roman Elegy examines these varied and visually striking textual dreamscapes, arguing that the poets exploited dynamics of visual representation to allow readers to share in the intensely personal experience of dreaming.
            By treating dreams as a mode for viewing, an analogy suggested by diverse ancient authors, Emma Scioli extracts new information from the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid about the Roman concept of “seeing” dreams. Through comparison with other visual modes of description, such as ekphrasis and simile, as well as with related types of visual experience, such as fantasy and voyeurism, Scioli demonstrates similarities between artist, dreamer, and poet as creators, identifying the dreamer as a particular type of both viewer and narrator.

In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change.

Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at the margins of this poetic discourse—mistresses, rivals, enslaved characters, overlooked members of households—their own identities, even when they do not speak. She demonstrates how the three poets create a prominent aesthetic of corporeal abjection and imperfection, associating the body as much with blood, wounds, and corporeal disintegration as with elegance, refinement, and sensuality.

It is 2009: writer Clara Burger arrives in Rome to sort out the affairs and clear the flat of her school friend Ines, prematurely dead from cancer. Sorting through Ines's belongings, Clara finds a manuscript containing not only an autobiographical account of Ines's strange experiences while working as a chambermaid in Rome in the summer of 1978, but also the life story of her former employer, the hotelier Emma Manente. Originally from Italy's German-speaking enclave South Tyrol (like Clara and Ines), Emma first comes to Rome in the late 1930s and becomes an eyewitness to the capital's turbulent past and present: Mussolini's fascist regime, the Nazi occupation and an uneasy postwar democracy threatened by corruption and extremism. In a sweeping tale of remembrance and reconciliation, of lives unfulfilled and loves unrequited, Roman Elegy interweaves the personal stories of three resilient women with a fascinating historical narrative of the Eternal City, in all its contrasting squalor and beauty, compassion and savagery.