Studies of Latin love elegy which seriously challenge the way we think about this genre are rare these days, and it is striking that the most provocative and innovative books on elegy to have been published in the last few years have been informed in some way by the critical theories of Lacanian psychoanalysis (most prominently, recent treatments by Michaela Janan and Paul Alllen Miller). Hunter Gardner's contribution to David Konstan's and Alison Sharrock's excellent series, Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory, continues this trend by judiciously drawing upon Julia Kristeva's model of ‘women's time’ (le temps des femmes) to help shed new light on both the attraction of the female elegiac beloved to her amator and her ultimate rejection by him — according to the traditional master plot of Augustan elegy. That master plot, as G. shows: ‘posits an emphatically “young” (iuvenis) lover in a constant state of rejection from his nearly divine, but hopelessly fickle beloved … [while] erotic consummation of the elegiac relationship, a relationship maintained primarily through strategies of delay, deferral and concealment, remains ever receding from the amator’s view’ (5–6). Of course, the relationship, like the beloved quasi-immortal puella herself, matures over the course of time, and the eventual transformation of puella into anus prompts her lover's own ‘erotic, civic, and poetic maturation’ (5), marking the end of the affair (there are no happy endings in the elegiac story-world) — and his return to civic life.

In elucidating this erotic, poetic and narrative life-cycle, G. takes as the starting point for her analysis a detailed consideration of the temporality of the human life course and its milestones, treating time in the discourse and drama of elegy as an embodied concept: ‘that is, time as measured by a single erotically motivated human subject, and used to organize that subject's experience in terms of a past, present, and future’ (10). That subject's experience is not only gendered but grounded in a specific socio-historical context, and G. offers an exemplary overview of the asymmetrical timelines open to the elegiac poet-lover and his puella in a chapter on ‘Coming-of-Age in Augustan Rome’, in which she argues that ‘the Princeps’ interventions in the life cycles of his subjects prompted the concerns of time, ageing, and immortality so evident in elegiac poetry’ (33). Indeed, the next three chapters go on to illustrate how the male elegiac amator appropriates the time-line and temporal attributes of the puella in order (temporarily) to resist the accelerated maturity encouraged and exemplified by the Princeps and so to realize the pleasures of an ‘arrested development’. The first of these, ‘Taming the Velox Puella’, offers a nicely nuanced close reading of Propertius 1.1 (treated as ‘a template for those temporal pressures felt throughout Propertian elegy’ (59)), and shows how ‘the performance of the elegiac lament, with all its cyclical wandering, completed through groans and prayers …, allows the amator to confront his temporality’ (82). The following chapter, ‘Two Senes: Delia and Messalla’ focuses predominantly upon the so-called ‘Delia cycle’ of the Tibullan corpus, to explore ‘how the ideal of inertia and the static existence it implies shapes the life course and love story of the Tibullan amator’ (86). And the final chapter in this section, ‘Ovid: Elegy at the Crossroads’ convincingly argues that ‘Ovid uses the Callimachean recusatio as a delaying strategy par excellence: the poet-lover of the Amores conflates elegy's frequently recognized erotic deferrals with the generic deferrals that hinder his evolution towards writing patriotically inspired verse’ (115).

The second half of the book looks more closely at the temporal qualities associated with elegy's puellae, here making fuller use of Kristeva's concept of ‘women's time’ and its Lacanian (and Platonic) foundations, to show some of the ways in which the elegiac figure of the ‘abandoned beloved’ (146) articulates both the puella and amator’s gendered and ‘genred’ experiences of time: ‘that is, an experience defined by repetition, cyclicality, and spatial enclosure’ (146). This section offers a persuasive demonstration of the ways in which the marginalized elegiac puella ‘offers the poet-lover a space of retreat, a suspension of the literary and political ideologies that threaten to shape the course of his life’ (254). The puer delicatus receives some attention here (187–9), but it is noticeable that elegy's only extant female poet, Sulpicia, does not. She is marginalized to an early footnote (5 n. 12), and it does seem something of a missed opportunity to have excluded Sulpicia's poetry from this study, given the potential insights into le temps des femmes in Augustan Rome and Augustan love elegy that her work clearly has to show.

Nevertheless, this volume represents an innovative, persuasive and very welcome new study of Roman elegy. It includes some particularly fine close readings of individual poems (especially Propertius 1.1 and 1.3, Tibullus 1.3 and 1.4, and Ovid, Amores 1.8), carries its theoretical learning lightly, and should be required reading for all students of Augustan literature.