Romantic Antiquity. Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832.

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Schutzumschlag etwas berieben, sonst sehr guter Zustand / dust jacket a bit rubbed, otherwise very good condition. - 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; tranformative 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. / CONTENTS Introduction PART I. Political Writing and the Novel 1. Rome and the Revolution Controversy Burke�s Use of Rome in the Reflections Roman Heroes as the Model of Godwin�s Selfless Benevolence 2. From Roman to roman: The Jacobin Novel and the Roman Legacy in the 1790s Emma Courtney and the Problem of Roman Reading The Moral and Pedagogical Potential of the Novel Form Godwin and the Case for the Novel as an Agent of Social Change Holcroft, Inchbald, and the Critical Account of Classical Learning PART II POETRY 3. A Roman Standard: Byron, Ancient Rome, and Literary Decline Rome, the Decline of Poetry, and the Letter to John Murray Childe Harold and the Ruins of Rome 4. �Yet the Capital of the World�: Rome, Repetition, and History in Shelley�s Later Writings Rome in Shelley�s Historical Imagination Rome and Greece in Shelley�s Philosophical View Thomson, Shelley, and Liberty Rome and Hellas Rome, Athens, and Imitation in Shelley�s Defence of Poetry The Bureaucratization of the Imaginative PART III. DRAMA 5. Rome-antic Shakespeare: Coriolanus on Stage and Page, 1789-1820 Shakespeare and the Classics Shakespeare and Romantic Performance: Kemble�s Coriolanus Kean�s Challenge to Kemble�s Coriolanus Hazlitt, Coriolanus, and the Aristocratic Imagination 6. What Is the People? Rome on the Romantic Stage after Kemble John Howard Payne�s Brutus: Staging Regicide after the Revolution J. S. Knowles�s Caius Gracchus: Agrarian Revolt and the Politics of Corn Catiline: Democracy, Empire, and the Reaction to the Roman Revival Conclusion Bibliography Index. ISBN 9780195376128