Romantic antiquity : Rome in the British imagination, 1789-1832 / Jonathan Sachs.
2010
PR457 .S33 2010 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
Items
Details
Title
Romantic antiquity : Rome in the British imagination, 1789-1832 / Jonathan Sachs.
Author
Sachs, Jonathan, 1969-
ISBN
9780195376128
0195376129
0195376129
Imprint
Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.
Language
English
Description
x, 304 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Call Number
PR457 .S33 2010
Dewey Decimal Classification
820.9/35823702
Summary
"While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle eighteenth century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has skewed our understanding of British Romanticism as being either a full-scale rejection of classical precedents or an embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produced a changed understanding of the Roman past for Romantic writers; transformative because Rome became the locus for new understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book positions Rome as central to a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French Revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theater, where, author Jonathan Sachs argues, the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as antidemocratic, or "right royal."" "By exposing how Roman references helped structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacted fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book recasts how we view the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle."--BOOK JACKET.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Series
Classical presences.
Record Appears in
On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
All Resources
Table of Contents
Pt. 1, Political writing and the novel. Rome and the Revolution Controversy ; From Roman to roman : the Jacobin novel and the Roman legacy in the 1790s
Pt. 2, A Roman standard : Byron, ancient Rome, and literary decline ; Yet the capital of the world : Rome, repetition, and history in Shelley's later writings
Pt. 3, Rome
antic Shakespeare : Coriolanus on stage and page, 1789
1820 ; What is the people? Rome on the Romantic stage after Kemble.
Pt. 2, A Roman standard : Byron, ancient Rome, and literary decline ; Yet the capital of the world : Rome, repetition, and history in Shelley's later writings
Pt. 3, Rome
antic Shakespeare : Coriolanus on stage and page, 1789
1820 ; What is the people? Rome on the Romantic stage after Kemble.