Download or read book From Gibbon to Auden written by G.W. Bowersock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For several decades G. W. Bowersock has been one of our leading historians of the classical world. This volume collects seventeen of his essays, each illustrating how the classical past has captured the imagination of some of the greatest figures in modern historiography and literature. The essays here range across three centuries, the eighteenth to the twentieth, and are divided chronologically. The great Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon is in large part the unifying force of this collection as he appears prominently in the first four essays, beginning with Bowersock's engaging introduction to the methods and genius behind The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's profound influence is revealed in subsequent essays on Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century scholar famous for his history of the Italian Renaissance but whose work on late antiquity is only now being fully appreciated; the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose annotations on Gibbon's Decline and Fall tell us much about his own historical poems; and finally W. H. Auden, whose poem and little known essay "The Fall of Rome" were, in quirky ways, tributes to Gibbon. The collection reprints Auden's poem and essay in full. The result is a rich survey of the early modern and modern uses of the classical past by one of its most important contemporary commentators.
Download or read book Gibbon s Christianity written by Hugh Liebert and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has never been much doubt about the faith of the “infidel historian” Edward Gibbon. But for all of Gibbon’s skepticism regarding Christianity’s central doctrines, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not merely seek to oppose Christianity; he confronted it as a philosophical and historical puzzle. Gibbon’s Christianity tallies the results and conditions of that confrontation. Using rich correspondence, private journals, early works, and memoirs that were never completed, Hugh Liebert provides intimate access to Gibbon’s life in order to better understand his complex relationship with religion. Approaching the Decline and Fall from the context surrounding its conception, Liebert shows how Gibbon adapted explanations of the Roman republic’s rise to account for a new spiritual republic and, subsequently, the rise of modern Europe. Taken together, Liebert’s analysis of this context, including the nuance of Gibbon’s relationship to Christianity, and his readings of Gibbon’s better- and lesser-known texts suggest a historian more eager to comprehend Christianity’s worldly power than to sneer at or dismiss it. Eminently readable and wholly accessible to anyone interested in or familiar with the Decline and Fall, this groundbreaking reassessment of Gibbon’s most famous work will appeal especially to scholars of eighteenth-century studies.
Download or read book The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon Harnack and Rodney Stark written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2010 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of Christianity up to the victory of Constantine has often been studied and remains a puzzling phenomenon. In this valedictory lecture Jan N. Bremmer concentrates on the explanations adduced, focusing in particular on the works of three iconic figures from the last two hundred and fifty years: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of Edward Gibbon, the most famous ancient historian of all time, at the end of the eighteenth century; Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums of Adolf von Harnack, the greatest historian of early Christianity of all time, around 1900, and The Rise of Christianity of Rodney Stark, the most adventurous sociologist of religion of our times, at the end of the twentieth century.Bremmer locates their concerns and explanations within their own times, but also takes them seriously as scholars, discussing their analyses and approaches. In this way he shows both the continuities and the innovations in the evolving view which scholarship presents of early Christianity. Bremmer's exceptional knowledge of the huge range of scholarship and his humane and balanced judgment make this lecture the ideal introduction to the many problems raised by Christianity's displacement of paganism
Download or read book In Solitude for Company written by Wystan Hugh Auden and published by Auden Studies. This book was released on 1995 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In Solitude, for Company' contains two hitherto unpublished lectures. The first of these, introduced by Nicholas Jenkins, is on the theme of vocation. It was delivered during the war years, when Auden, newly arrived in the United States, was redefining his sense of his own vocation. The second lecture, given near the end of his life, discusses the work of Sigmund Freud. Katherine Bucknell sets this lecture in context with a full examination of Auden's intensely ambivalent attitude to Freud. The classicist G.W. Bowersock introduces the text of Auden's unpublished 1966 essay on 'The Fall of Rome' in which Auden draws a powerful series of parallels between the end of Roman civilization and the decline of our own society. Also included is a generous and fully-annotated selection of Auden's correspondence with his close friends James and Tania Stern which reveals much new and important biographical information.
Download or read book Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History written by Charlotte Roberts and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Gibbon's presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of transcendent heroism and individual liberty, but also an insistent awareness of the dangers these values pose to coherence and narrative order. In this study, Charlotte Roberts demonstrates how these dynamics also inform the 'character' of the Decline and Fall: in which ironic difference confronts enervating uniformity; oddity counters specious lucidity; and revision combats repetition. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History explores the Decline and Fall as a work of scholarship and of literature, tracing both its expansive outline and its expressive details. A close examination of each of the three instalments of Gibbon's history reveals an intimate relationship between the style of Gibbon's narrative and the overall shape of his historiographical composition. The constant interplay between style and substance, or between the particular details of composition and the larger patterns of argument and narrative, informs every aspect of Gibbon's work: from his reception of established and innovative historiographical conventions to the expression of his narrative voice. Through a combination of close reading and larger literary and scholarly analysis, Charlotte Roberts conveys a sense of the Decline and Fall as a work more complex and conflicted, in its tone and structure, than has been appreciated by previous scholars, without losing sight of the grand contours of Gibbon's superlative achievement.
Download or read book W H Auden written by John Fuller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To help readers understand Auden's work, the poet and scholar John Fuller examines all of Auden's published poems, plays, and libretti, leaving out only some juvenilia. In unprecedented detail, he reviews the works' publishing history, paraphrases difficult passages, and explains allusions. He points out interesting variants (including material abandoned in drafts), identifies sources, looks at verse forms, and offers critical interpretations. Along the way, he presents a wealth of facts about Auden's works and life that are available in no other publication.
Download or read book The Conquest of Ruins written by Julia Hell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.
Download or read book David Jones and Rome written by Jasmine Hunter Evans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction:'at the turn of time' --Part I. David Jones and empire --Introduction to Part I:The political formation of the Roman analogy --Shaping Rome through 'contactual' experience: war and post-war disillusionment --British imperial rhetoric: subverting the Roman analogy of empire --Expanding the Roman imperial analogy: fascism, communism, and the co-agency of empires --Part II. David Jones and cyclical historyIntroduction to Part II:The Roman precedent for the decline of western civilisation --Cyclical history and Roman decline: a theoretical foundation for the Roman fragments --The forms of the late civilisational phase: charting the decline of the West from Roman precedents --The antithesis of culture and civilisation: examining Spenglerian principles in Roman poetry --Part III. David Jones and culture --Introduction to Part III: Recovering Rome in the pursuit of Western unity and continuity --Investigating cultural decline: the Classical and Christian traditions --Reconnecting with Rome: the fight for the unity and continuity of Western culture --Jones's cultural theory: re-establishing the bridge in response to the break --Part IV. David Jones and Wales --Introduction to Part IV:The Roman foundation of the Welsh nation --Reimagining cultural decline: the fight for Wales as Britain s last link to Rome --Rewriting Welsh history: establishing Wales as a Roman nation --Cultural dynamics: the place of Rome in the bridge --Conclusion:'down the history maze'.
Download or read book Queer Rebels written by Łukasz Smuga and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer Rebels is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s This Breathing World (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature written by David Hopkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The present volume [3] is the first to appear of the five that will comprise The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL will have its own editor or team of editors"--Preface.
Download or read book Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth written by Paula Marantz Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-03 with total page 1286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. When film finally began to talk in 1927, the medium had already done its work. It had helped translate representation into a dynamic visual form and had "Americanized" the world. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Nineteenth-century American culture had already charged these elements with meaning--the body through vaudeville and burlesque, landscape through landscape painting and moving panoramas, and the face through portrait photography. Integrating these popular forms, silent film also developed genres that showcased each of its basic elements: the body in comedy, the landscape in the western, and the face in melodrama. At the same time, it helped produce a new idea of character, embodied in the American movie star. Cohen's book offers a fascinating new perspective on American cultural history. It shows how nineteenth-century literature can be said to anticipate twentieth-century film--how Douglas Fairbanks was, in a sense, successor to Walt Whitman. And rather than condemning the culture of celebrity and consumption that early Hollywood helped inspire, the book highlights the creative and democratic features of the silent-film ethos. Just as notable, Cohen champions the concept of the "American myth" in the wake of recent attempts to discredit it. She maintains that American silent film helped consolidate and promote a myth of possibility and self-making that continues to dominate the public imagination and stands behind the best impulses of our contemporary world.
Download or read book Preposterous Virgil written by Juan Christian Pellicer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study in reception develops close readings of English literature as means of interrogating Virgil's texts. Through four case studies, bookended by wide-ranging introductory and concluding chapters, this book shows how interpreting the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid through modern responses can serve to focus on aspects of Virgil that would otherwise be differently perceived or else escape notice altogether. Juan Christian Pellicer probes our perceptions of the three Virgilian genres (pastoral, georgic, and epic) and analyzes the ways in which modern reconfigurations of these genres can inform our readings of Virgil's works, as well as help us realize how our own ideas about Virgil reflect the literary receptions through which we approach his texts. This book offers a practical demonstration of classical reception and its value as a critical procedure. By testing the value of modern responses to Virgil as means by which to read his texts, Pellicer critically examines a central tenet of reception studies of classical authors, namely that our understanding of their work can benefit from the receptions through which we perceive them. The reader will find Virgil's texts reconfigured in challenging new ways and will find new appreciations of the classical traditions that inform key texts in the English canon.
Download or read book W H Auden in Context written by Tony Sharpe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-21 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authoritative essays in this collection provide helpful contextual models for engaging with W. H. Auden's poetry.
Download or read book City of Demons written by Dayna S. Kalleres and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it would appear in studies of late antique ecclesiastical authority and power that scholars have covered everything, an important aspect of the urban bishop has long been neglected: his role as demonologist and exorcist. When the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the realm, bishops and priests everywhere struggled to "Christianize" the urban spaces still dominated by Greco-Roman monuments and festivals. During this period of upheaval, when congregants seemingly attended everything but their own "orthodox" church, many ecclesiastical leaders began simultaneously to promote aggressive and insidious depictions of the demonic. In City of Demons, Dayna S. Kalleres investigates this developing discourse and the church-sponsored rituals that went along with it, showing how shifting ecclesiastical demonologies and evolving practices of exorcism profoundly shaped Christian life in the fourth century.
Download or read book Late Ancient Knowing written by Catherine Michael Chin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-05-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, scholars from a range of disciplines explore the activity of knowing in late antiquity by focusing on thirteen major concepts from the intellectual, social, political, and cultural history of the period. They ask two questions about each of these concepts: what did late ancient people know about them, and how was that knowledge expressed in people’s actions? Late Ancient Knowing integrates intellectual history, post-structuralist literary theory, and recent trends in cognitive science to examine the ways that historical thought-worlds both shaped individual lives and were in turn shaped by the actions of individuals. Each chapter treats its main concept as a problem both of knowledge and of practice or behavior. The result is a richly imagined description of how people of this time understood and navigated their world, from travel through the countryside and encounters with demons to philosophical medicine and the etiquette of imperial courts.
Download or read book Horace s Odes written by Richard Tarrant and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature introduces individual works of Greek and Latin literature to readers who are approaching them for the first time. Each volume sets the work in its literary and historical context and aims to offer a balanced and engaging assessment of its content, artistry, and purpose. A brief survey of the influence of the work upon subsequent generations is included to demonstrate its enduring relevance and power. All quotations from the original are translated into English. Horace's body of lyric poetry, the Odes, is one of the greatest achievements of Latin literature and a foundational text for the Western poetic tradition. These 103 exquisitely crafted poems speak in a distinctive voice -- usually detached, often ironic, always humane -- reflecting on the changing Roman world that Horace lived in and also on more universal themes of friendship, love, and mortality. In this book, Richard Tarrant introduces readers to the Odes by situating them in the context of Horace's career as a poet and by defining their relationship to earlier literature, Greek and Roman. Several poems have been freshly translated by the author; others appear in versions by Horace's best modern translators. A number of poems are analyzed in detail, illustrating Horace's range of subject matter and his characteristic techniques of form and structure. A substantial final chapter traces the reception of the Odes from Horace's own time to the present. Readers of this book will gain an appreciation for the artistry of one of the finest lyric poets of all time.
Download or read book All Things to All Cultures written by Mark Harding and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Things to All Cultures sets Paul in his first-century context and illuminates his interactions with Jews, Greeks, and Romans as he spread the gospel in the Mediterranean world. In addition to exploring Paul's context and analyzing his letters, the book has chapters on the chronology of Paul's life, the text of the Pauline letters, the scholarly contributions to our understanding of Paul over the last 150 years, and the theology of the Pauline corpus. There is no comparable introduction to Paul that integrates the Jewish, Greek, and Roman influences on him and the letters that make up a substantial portion of the New Testament. Contributors: Mike Bird Cavan Concannon David Eastman Chris Forbes Mark Harding Tim Harris Jim Harrison Paul McKechnie Brent Nongbri Ian Smith Murray Smith Larry Welborn
