Generic Enrichment in Plutarch’s Lives

Book excerpt: This volume addresses the important literary phenomenon of ‘generic enrichment’ in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. It examines the ways in which features of other genres are deployed and incorporated in Plutarch’s biographies and the effects of this on the texts themselves and readers’ responses to them. ‘Generic enrichment’, a term coined by Stephen Harrison with reference to Latin poetry, is used here to refer to the different ways in which a text of one genre might incorporate or evoke features of other genres. The fact that particular Plutarchan biographies may contain not only allusions to specific texts from a variety of genres, but also features such as vocabulary, phraseology, and plot-forms which evoke other genres, has been noticed sporadically by scholars. However, this is the first volume to discuss this feature as a distinct phenomenon across the corpus of Parallel Lives and to attempt an assessment of its effect. Chapters cover the interaction of Plutarchan biography with a series of genres, including archaic poetry, comedy, tragedy, historiography, philosophy, geographical and scientific texts, oratory, inscriptions, novelistic writing and periegetical works. Together these studies demonstrate the generic complexity and richness of Plutarch’s Lives, enhance our understanding of ancient biography in general and Plutarchan biography in particular, and explore the range of effects such generic enrichment might have on readers. Generic Enrichment in Plutarch’s Lives is of interest to students and scholars of Plutarch and ancient biography, as well as to those working in other periods and genres of both Latin and Greek literature, and to those beyond the field of Classical Studies who are interested in questions of genre and literary theory.