Keats and Hellenism

Keats and Hellenism

Author: Martin Aske

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-01-27

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780521604192

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This book proposes a fresh and original interpretation of Keats' use of classical mythology in his verse. Dr Aske argues that classical antiquity appears to Keats as a supreme fiction, authoritative yet disconcerting, and his poems represent hard endeavours to come to terms with the influence of that fiction. The major poems (most notably Endymion, Hyperion, the Ode on a Grecian Urn and Lamia) form a stage, as it were, upon which is played out a psychic drama between the modern poet and his classical muse. The study is especially bold in its assimilation of historical scholarship and literary theory to a close reading of the texts. Individual poems are discussed in the context of late Enlightenment and Romantic attitudes towards antiquity and in the light of recent critical theory, in particular the theory of literary history and influence formulated by Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. Keats emerges as a significant example of the way in which a poet tries to establish a distinct identity under the burden of history and of literary tradition.


British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation

British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation

Author: Alexander Grammatikos

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-24

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 331990440X

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British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation makes an original contribution to the field of British Romantic Hellenism (and Romanticism more broadly) by emphasizing the diversity of Romantic-era writers’ attitudes towards, and portrayals of, Modern Greece. Whereas, traditionally, studies of British Romantic Hellenism have predominantly focused on Europe’s preoccupation with an idealized Ancient Greece, this study emphasizes the nuanced and complex nature of British Romantic writers’ engagements with Modern Greece. Specifically, the book emphasizes the ways that early nineteenth-century British literature about contemporary Greece helped to strengthen British-Greek intercultural relations and, ultimately, to situate Greece within a European sphere of influence.


The Politics and Ethics of Identity

The Politics and Ethics of Identity

Author: Richard Ned Lebow

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-30

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1139561200

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We are multiple, fragmented, and changing selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities. What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central in post-war scholarship, fiction, and the media? Following Hegel, Richard Ned Lebow contends that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflexive and social selves. To address this problem Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations. Lebow develops his arguments through comparative analysis of ancient and modern literary, philosophical, religious, and musical texts. He asks how we might come to terms with the fragmented and illusionary nature of our identities and explores some political and ethical implications of doing so.


Black Athena

Black Athena

Author: Martin Bernal

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 668

ISBN-13: 1978807139

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Winner of the 1990 American Book Award What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular. In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal links a wide range of areas and disciplines—drama, poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of “modern scholarship.”


Victorian Classical Burlesques

Victorian Classical Burlesques

Author: Laura Monros-Gaspar

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1472537882

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The Victorian classical burlesque was a popular theatrical genre of the mid-19th century. It parodied ancient tragedies with music, melodrama, pastiche, merciless satire and gender reversal. Immensely popular in its day, the genre was also intensely metatheatrical and carries significance for reception studies, the role and perception of women in Victorian society and the culture of artistic censorship. This anthology contains the annotated text of four major classical burlesques: Antigone Travestie (1845) by Edward L. Blanchard, Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (1856) by Robert Brough, Alcestis; the Original Strong-Minded Woman (1850) and Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) by Francis Talfourd. The cultural and textual annotations highlight the changes made to the scripts from the manuscripts sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office and, by explaining the topical allusions and satire, elucidate elements of the burlesques' popular cultural milieu. An in-depth critical introduction discusses the historical contexts of the plays' premieres and unveils the cultural processes behind the reception of the myths and original tragedies. As the burlesques combined spectacular effects with allusions to contemporary affairs, ambivalent and provocative attitudes to women, the plays represent an essential tool for reading the social history of the era.


What Was Tragedy?

What Was Tragedy?

Author: Blair Hoxby

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0191065994

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Twentieth century critics have definite ideas about tragedy. They maintain that in a true tragedy, fate must feel the resistance of the tragic hero's moral freedom before finally crushing him, thus generating our ambivalent sense of terrible waste coupled with spiritual consolation. Yet far from being a timeless truth, this account of tragedy only emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. What Was Tragedy? demonstrates that this account of the tragic, which has been hegemonic from the early nineteenth century to the present despite all the twists and turns of critical fashion in the twentieth century, obscured an earlier poetics of tragedy that evolved from 1515 to 1795. By reconstructing that poetics, Blair Hoxby makes sense of plays that are "merely pathetic, not truly tragic," of operas with happy endings, of Christian tragedies, and of other plays that advertised themselves as tragedies to early modern audiences and yet have subsequently been denied the palm of tragedy by critics. In doing so, Hoxby not only illuminates masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Racine, Milton, and Mozart, he also revivifies a vast repertoire of tragic drama and opera that has been relegated to obscurity by critical developments since 1800. He suggests how many of these plays might be reclaimed as living works of theater. And by reconstructing a lost conception of tragedy both ancient and modern, he illuminates the hidden assumptions and peculiar blind-spots of the idealist critical tradition that runs from Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel, through Wagner, Nietzsche, and Freud, up to modern post-structuralism.


Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic

Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic

Author: Angus James Nicholls

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781571133076

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The first book to examine Goethe's writings on the daemonic in relation to both Classical philosophy and German Idealism. For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a "divine voice" known as his "daimonion." Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamannand Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works. Reading Goethe's works on the daemonic through theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Gadamer, Adorno, and Blumenberg, Nicholls contends that they contain arguments concerning reason, nature, and subjectivity that are central to both European Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Angus Nicholls is Claussen-Simon Foundation Research Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London.


Box, Pit, and Gallery

Box, Pit, and Gallery

Author: James J. Lynch

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0520349431

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.


Disarmed

Disarmed

Author: Gregory Curtis

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-07-18

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0307483835

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In the spring of 1820, on the Aegean island of Melos, an unsuspecting farmer was digging for marble building blocks when he unearthed the statue that would come to be known as the Venus de Milo. From the moment of its discovery a battle for possession ensued and was won, eventually, by the French. Touted by her keepers in the Louvre as the great classical find of the era, the sculpture gained instant celebrity–and yet its origins had yet to be documented or verified. From the flurry of excitement surrounding her discovery, to the raging disputes over her authenticity, to the politics and personalities that have given rise to her mystique, Gregory Curtis has given us a riveting look at the embattled legacy of a beloved icon and a remarkable tribute to one of the world’s great works of art.