Romantic antiquity : Rome in the British imagination, 1789-1832 / Jonathan Sachs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sachs, Jonathan, 1969-

Series:

Classical presences

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

Rome--In literature.

Rome.

Rome (Empire).

History in literature.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Politics and literature.

Great Britain.

History.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

English literature--Roman influences.

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Physical Description:

x, 304 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.

Summary:

The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Political Writing and the Novel

1 Rome and the Revolution Controversy 49

Burke's Use of Rome in the Reflections 52

Roman Heroes as the Model of Godwin's Selfless Benevolence 65

2 From Roman to roman: The Jacobin Novel and the Roman Legacy in the 1790s 77

Emma Courtney and the Problem of Roman Reading 82

The Moral and Pedagogical Potential of the Novel Form 90

Godwin and the Case for the Novel as an Agent of Social Change 93

Holcroft, Inchbald, and the Critical Account of Classical Learning 101

Part II Poetry

3 A Roman Standard: Byron, Ancient Rome, and Literary Decline 115

Rome, the Decline of Poetry, and the Letter to John Murray 116

Childe Harold and the Ruins of Rome 131

4 "Yet the Capital of the World": Rome, Repetition, and History in Shelley's Later Writings 146

Rome in Shelley's Historical Imagination 151

Rome and Greece in Shelley's Philosophical View 154

Thomson, Shelley, and Liberty 156

Rome and Hellas 161

Rome, Athens, and Imitation in Shelley's Defence of Poetry 164

The Bureaucratization of the Imaginative 172

Part III Drama

5 Rome-antic Shakespeare: Coriolanus on Stage and Page, 1789-1820 179

Shakespeare and the Classics 184

Shakespeare and Romantic Performance: Kemble's Coriolanus 189

Kean's Challenge to Kemble's Coriolanus 206

Hazlitt, Coriolanus, and the Aristocratic Imagination 209

6 What Is the People? Rome on the Romantic Stage after Kemble 221

John Howard Payne's Brutus: Staging Regicide after the Revolution 231

J. S. Knowles's Caius Gracchus: Agrarian Revolt and the Politics of Corn 247

Catiline: Democracy, Empire, and the Reaction to the Roman Revival 261.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780195376128

0195376129

OCLC:

301948408