Ancients Against Moderns

Ancients Against Moderns PDF Author: Joan DeJean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226141381
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
As the end of the 20th century approaches, many predict that it will mirror the 19th-century decline into decadence. The author of this text finds a closer analogy with the culture wars of France in the 1690s - the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns.

Ancients Against Moderns

Ancients Against Moderns PDF Author: Joan DeJean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226141381
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
As the end of the 20th century approaches, many predict that it will mirror the 19th-century decline into decadence. The author of this text finds a closer analogy with the culture wars of France in the 1690s - the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns.

The Ancients and the Moderns

The Ancients and the Moderns PDF Author: Stanley Rosen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Between the Ancients and Moderns

Between the Ancients and Moderns PDF Author:
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300143461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The quarrel between the ancients and moderns was resumed in the 17th century as writers and artists debated how far to risk the freedom to innovate. This text argues that it was this tension that gave unity to the cultural life of the period and helped define its baroque character.

The Shock of the Ancient

The Shock of the Ancient PDF Author: Larry F. Norman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226591506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.

The Art of the Body

The Art of the Body PDF Author: Michael Squire
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857738569
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The art of the human body is arguably the most important and wide-ranging legacy bequeathed to us by Classical antiquity. Not only has it directed the course of western image-making, it has shaped our collective cultural imaginary - as ideal, antitype, and point of departure. This book is the first concerted attempt to grapple with that legacy: it explores the complex relationship between Graeco-Roman images of the body and subsequent western engagements with them, from the Byzantine icon to Venice Beach (and back again). Instead of approaching his material chronologically, Michael Squire faces up to its inherent modernity. Writing in a lively and accessible style, and supplementing his text with a rich array of pictures, he shows how Graeco-Roman images inhabit our world as if they were our own. The Art of the Body offers a series of comparative and thematic accounts, demonstrating the range of cultural ideas and anxieties that were explored through the figure of the body both in antiquity and in the various cultural landscapes that came afterwards. If we only strip down our aesthetic investment in the corpus of Graeco-Roman imagery, Squire argues, this material can shed light on both ancient and modern thinking. The result is a stimulating process of mutual illumination - and an exhilarating new approach to Classical art history.

The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns

The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns PDF Author: Benjamin Constant
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
This is an essay by Benjamin Constant. In this essay, Constant contrasted two views on freedom: one held by "the Ancients," particularly those in Classical Greece, and the other by members of modern societies. He investigates the dangers of attempting to impose ancient liberty in a modern context, as well as the risks associated with each type of liberty. The danger of ancient liberty was that men, preoccupied with securing their share of social power, might place too little value on individual rights and pleasures. The danger of modern liberty is that we will give up our right to participate in political power too easily, absorbed in the enjoyment of our independence and the pursuit of our particular interests." Constant believes that the two types of liberty must eventually be combined.

Ancients and Moderns in Europe

Ancients and Moderns in Europe PDF Author: Paddy Bullard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780729411776
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or Battle of the Books as it was known in England, famously pitted the Ancients on the one side and the Moderns on the other. This book presents a new intellectual history of the dispute, in which authors explore its manifestations across Europe in the arts and sciences, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. By paying close attention to local institutional contexts for the Querelle, contributors yield a complex picture of the larger debate. In intellectual life, authors uncover how the debate affected the publication of antiquarian scholarship, and how it became part of discussions in London coffee houses and the periodical press. Authors also position the Low Countries as the true pivot for a modernistic realignment of intellectual method, with concomitant rather than centralised developments in England and France. The volume is particularly concerned with the realisation of the Querelle in the realm of artistic and technical practice. Marrying modern approaches with ancient sympathies was fraught with difficulties, as contributors attest in analyses on musical writing, painting and the 'querelle du coloris', architectural practice and medical rhetorics. Tracing the deeper cultural resonances of the dispute, authors conclude by revealing how it fostered a new tendency to cultural self-reflection throughout Europe. Together, these contributions demonstrate how the Querelle acted as a leading principle for the configuration of knowledge across the arts and sciences throughout the early modern period, and also emphasise the links between historical debates and our contemporary understanding of what it means to be 'modern'.

Race

Race PDF Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755697855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.

Luck, Fate and Fortune

Luck, Fate and Fortune PDF Author: Esther Eidinow
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN: 9781845118433
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. Why and how the ancient Greeks tried to foretell the outcome of the present is the subject of Esther Eidinow's lively appraisal, which explores the legacy of ancient Greek notions of luck, fate and fortune in our own era, drawing on approaches to cognitive anthropology. Perhaps the most famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle at Delphi. But the Delphic Oracle is only the best-known example from a landscape covered by oracular sanctuaries; while across the literary genres of antiquity there are myriad tales - such as that of doomed Oedipus - which wrestle with the cruel vicissitudes of fate and fortune. Exploring some of the key ideas of ancient Greek culture that resonate with modern conceptions of destiny, Eidinow examines the ancients' notion of luck as a means to explain daily experiences. Focusing on writers such as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes, the author shows how concepts of fate in antiquity changed over time, in response to social and political currents.She draws too on modern cultural texts like "Terminator 2" and "Lawrence of Arabia", demonstrating how the recurring questions 'what if?' and 'why me?' are fundamental to the human relationship with an uncertain future, whether it be in the ancient past or the present day.

The Battle of the Books

The Battle of the Books PDF Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description