 First edition (US) | |
| Author | David Malouf |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Bill Bachman |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | George Braziller (US) Chatto & Windus (UK) |
Publication date | March 1978 (US) September 1978 (UK) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 174 pp |
| ISBN | 0-8076-0884-X |
| OCLC | 3543556 |
| 3.14 | |
| LC Class | PZ4.M25565 Im 1978 PR9619.3.M265 |
An Imaginary Life is a 1978 novella written by David Malouf. [1]
It tells the story of the Roman poet Ovid, during his exile in Tomis.
While there, Ovid lives with the natives, although he doesn't understand their language, and forms a bond with a wild boy who is found living wild in nature. The relationship between Ovid and the boy, at first one of protector and protected, becomes an alliance between two people in a foreign land.
Ovid comes to Tomis enculturated with a Roman world view and through his attempts at teaching the boy language is able to free himself from the constrictions of Latin and the encompassing perception of reality that is his only barrier against transcendence.
Ovid is continually searching for the Child and what he represents to him. He goes so far as to capture him in an attempt to learn from him, and to teach him language and conventions.
Reviewing the book in The Canberra Times Kevin Hart noted: "With writing of this sort, fiction that stretches the imagination far outside the confines of normal experience, the criterion for our judgment is not so much the extent of the imaginative flair displayed, but how the writer handles the problems caused by his extraordinary imagination. In this book all is worked out carefully, perhaps at times over-carefully, giving the impression that it is a superbly controlled exercise in style." [2]
"An Imaginary Life is, in part, about an individual journey from a state of being cut off and apart from the environment – of wishing to tame and exploit nature, of being totally entangled in language and culture – to a state of being in intimate contact with the untrained, wild things of the world. It is also about a poet, in thrall of civilisation, realising that there are other ways to live and experience; ways that are beautiful and fulfilling...Those themes – of belonging and exile, of how to relate to the environment and to those who are different to us – are core to the debate about what it means to be Australian today. An Imaginary Life does not provide a workable template for how to navigate the complexity of belonging and un-belonging, nor should it. It’s a novel not a policy document. It does, however, show us it is possible to imagine ways to do things differently, ways to live differently with each other and with nature. And once imagined, those other ways of living seem all the more possible." [3]
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
David George Joseph Malouf AO is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008, Malouf has lectured at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. He also delivered the 1998 Boyer Lectures.
The Tristia is a collection of letters written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during his exile from Rome. Despite five books of his copious bewailing of his fate, the immediate cause of Augustus's banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin poet to Pontus in AD 8 remains a mystery. In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died without ever returning to Rome.
The imaginary is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies.
The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is awarded annually as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for a book of collected poems or for a single poem of substantial length published in book form. It is named after Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971).
The Fasti, sometimes translated as The Book of Days or On the Roman Calendar, is a six-book Latin poem written by the Roman poet Ovid and published in AD 8. Ovid is believed to have left the Fasti incomplete when he was exiled to Tomis by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD. Written in elegiac couplets and drawing on conventions of Greek and Latin didactic poetry, the Fasti is structured as a series of eye-witness reports and interviews by the first-person vates with Roman deities, who explain the origins of Roman holidays and associated customs—often with multiple aetiologies. The poem is a significant, and in some cases unique, source of fact in studies of religion in ancient Rome; and the influential anthropologist and ritualist J.G. Frazer translated and annotated the work for the Loeb Classical Library series. Each book covers one month, January through June, of the Roman calendar, and was written several years after Julius Caesar replaced the old system of Roman time-keeping with what would come to be known as the Julian calendar.
Imagination in philosophy is the production of sensations, feelings and thoughts informing oneself. These experiences can be re-creations of past experiences, such as vivid memories with imagined changes, or completely invented and possibly fantastic scenes. Imagination helps apply knowledge to solve problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process. As a way of building theory, it is called "disciplined imagination". A way of training imagination is by listening to storytelling (narrative), in which the exactness of the chosen words is how it can "evoke worlds".
The Australian Literature Society Gold Medal is awarded annually by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for "an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year." From 1928 to 1974 it was awarded by the Australian Literature Society, then from 1983 by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, when the two organisations were merged.
Philip Max Neilsen is an Australian poet, fiction writer and editor. He teaches poetry at the University of Queensland and was previously professor of creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology.
Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent with history, fact, or plausibility. In a traditional narrow sense, "fiction" refers to written narratives in prose – often referring specifically to novels, novellas, and short stories. More broadly, however, fiction encompasses imaginary narratives expressed in any medium, including not just writings but also live theatrical performances, films, television programs, radio dramas, comics, role-playing games, and video games.
"The Gypsies" is a narrative poem in 569 lines by Alexander Pushkin, originally written in Russian in 1824 and first fully published in 1827. The last of Pushkin's four 'Southern Poems' written during his exile in the south of the Russian Empire, The Gypsies is also considered to be the most mature of these Southern poems, and has been praised for originality and its engagement with psychological and moral issues. The poem has inspired at least eighteen operas and several ballets.
Ovid among the Scythians is the title of two oil paintings by French artist Eugène Delacroix. The less famous second version was painted to integrate the figures and landscape and rectified the problems of scale of the first version, which had an unusual composition and strange scale of the characters, provoking negative criticism, even among Delacroix's admirers such as Baudelaire and Gautier, although artists like Edgar Degas were deeply impressed.
Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid's exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world; it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace, and was superficially Hellenized. According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman, he found trying. Ovid wrote that the cause of his exile was carmen et error, probably the Ars Amatoria and a personal indiscretion or mistake. The council of the city of Rome revoked his exile in December 2017, some 2000 years after his banishment.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1963.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1967.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1974.
Neighbours in a Thicket : Poems (1974) is the second poetry collection by Australian poet and author David Malouf. It won the ALS Gold Medal, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, and the Colin Roderick Award, all in 1974.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1978.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1981.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1982.