Introduction

The personal voice has been defined by Nancy K. Miller in Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York, 1991) as “an explicitly autobiographical performance within the act of criticism.” To write or speak about one’s research from a personal and autobiographical standpoint acknowledges and explores the unique relationship between the distinctive background of the researcher on the one hand, and the questions which she or he poses and privileges in the course of scholarly investigation on the other. In Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), one of the contributors to this volume, Charles Martindale, suggests a different way of describing our project. If, in Martindale’s words, “criticism can be represented as another telling, another story, to explain a text, which thereby enacts a particular closure, or a series of closures, on that text, but which in turn opens itself to further interpretations,” then each of the essays in this collection somehow insists on recognizing that the critic’s own story is an important component of the act of criticism.