The Matter of the Page

Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors

Shane Butler

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780299248246
• eBook ISBN: 9780299248239
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.
    Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of "the page" from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read.
    All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Presenting the Author
• The Backward Glance
• Myself Sick
• Latin Decomposition
• The Erasable Cicero
• The Surface of the Page
• The Folded Page
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index Locorum