The sites of Rome : time, space, memory / edited by David H. J. Larmour and Diana Spencer.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Larmour, David H. J. (David Henry James), 1959-

Spencer, Diana, 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rome (Italy)--In literature.

Rome (Italy).

Rome (Italy)--History--Miscellanea.

Latin literature--History and criticism.

Latin literature.

Rome (Italy)--In motion pictures.

Genre:

Trivia and miscellanea.

Physical Description:

xiv, 436 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

The essays in The Sites of Rome offer glimpses, sideways glances, and unexpected angles that open up this city-of-texts in its widest possible sense. A play upon the homonyms 'site' and 'sight' in the title points to a shared concern, namely how any of the visible components of Rome-the hills, the Tiber, the temples, the Fora, the Colosseum, the statues and monuments-operates as, or becomes, one of the sites sights of Rome.

Rome was a construction site for much of its history, a city continually reshaped and reconstituted in line with political and cultural change. Its perpetual and emblematic conjunction of ruins and rebuilding enmeshes Emperors and Popes, authors and artists from antiquity to the present. The contributors explore the visual framing of Rome within texts and artefacts that re-present the physical reality of the cityscape. In their readings, Rome emerges as an object of the gaze, but is also present in many other ways: as a character or spectator, as the human body or the mind, as unmarked space or semiotic overload, as ruin and emblem of decay, or as site of renovation and source of rejuvenation, as arena, sewer, battlefield, theme-park, or museum. Gazing at a particular sight/site is never performed in isolation; context is provided by nearby buildings and monuments and by earlier constructions (visible in ruins, memories or in dislocated fragments); it is enriched by an understanding of each site's authors and architects, and by the scenes from history or myth their location evokes. Ultimately, the collection as a whole suggests that each approach to Rome is part of an on-going process that makes this city-Roma, recepta-an ideal model for thinking about Western urban consciousness, and the topographic qualities of the imagination.

Contents:

Introduction : Roma, recepta : a topography of the imagination / David H.J. Larmour and Diana Spencer

Rome at a gallop : Livy, on not gazing, jumping, or toppling into the void / Diana Spencer

'In the name of the father' : Ovid's Theban law / Micaela Janan

'I get around' : sadism, desire, and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal / Paul Allen Miller

Holes in the body : sites of abjection in Juvenal's Rome / David H.J. Larmour

Victim and voyeur : Rome as a character in Tacitus' Histories 3 / Rhiannon Ash

The gates of Janus : Bakhtin and Plutarch's Roman meta-chronotope / Jason Banta

Staging Rome : the Renaissance, Rome, and humanism's classical crisis / Jacob Blevins

Sizing up Rome, or theorizing the overview / Caroline Vout

Ancient Rome for little comrades : the legacy of classical antiquity in Soviet childrens' literature / Marina Balina

The sites and sights of Rome in Fellini's films : 'not a human habitation but a psychical entity' / Elena Theodorakopoulos.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [385]-418) and indexes.

ISBN:

0199217491

9780199217496

OCLC:

125401438