Author: Cecil Maurice Bowra
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Epic poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222959
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Inside "Paradise Lost" opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint’s comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books of Paradise Lost and to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects of Paradise Lost—its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice. Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam’s decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of this Paradise Lost is a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost reveals itself in new formal configurations and unsuspected levels of meaning and design.

Author: R. Alden Smith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405159499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Virgil offers undergraduates, graduate students and general readers a comprehensive and carefully balanced introduction to the works and literary reception of Virgil. Offers a fresh, comprehensive introduction to Virgil in translation Explores the historical context in which Virgil wrote and lived Discusses the manuscript tradition of Virgil Traces the poet’s literary influence on later authors and his impact on the arts Includes suggestions for further readings

Author: Charles Martindale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521498852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectives both traditional and innovative on Virgil's works, and a renewed sense of why Virgil matters today. The Companion is divided into four main sections, focussing on reception, genre, context, and form. This ground-breaking book not only provides a wealth of material for an informed reading but also offers sophisticated insights which point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.

Author: Nicholas McDowell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241732
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalization John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost—but would first justify the killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.” Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.

Author: Virgil
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Epic poetry, Latin
Languages : la
Pages : 150

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Author: Maggie Kilgour
Publisher: Classical Presences
ISBN: 9780198717126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid contributes to our understanding of the Roman poet Ovid, the Renaissance writer Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions through history. It examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, as well as the long tradition of reception that had begun with Ovid himself, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past, and especially his relation to Virgil, gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works. Throughout his career Milton thinks through and with Ovid, whose stories and figures inform his exploration of the limits and possibilities of creativity, change, and freedom. Examining this specific relation between two very individual and different authors, Kilgour also explores the forms and meaning of creative imitation. Intertexuality was not only central to the two writers' poetic practices but helped shape their visions of the world. While many critics seek to establish how Milton read Ovid, Kilgour debates the broader question of why does considering how Milton read Ovid matter? How do our readings of this relation change our understanding of both Milton and Ovid; and does it tell us about how traditions are changed and remade through time?

Author: John Milton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Author: Colin Burrow
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Epic Romance: Homer to Milton presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer, through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers worked, to the idiom within which these writers worked, to the indiviudal authors in historical context link to develop a powerful explanation of how and why the epic changed from Homer to Milton. Dr Burrow shows how the romance hero, whose prime motives are love and pity, emerged from a sequence of reinterpretations of Homer which runs from Virgil's Aeneid and its medieval redactions to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Relating the emergence of the romance hero to the digressive, decentred form of romance, the author explores how later writers sought to control the digressive energies of the romance hero and to create a language and form of heroism more like those of classical epic. This analysis leads to a fresh account of the way in which Renaissance writers responded to, and moved tentatively towards, the writing of the past. Arguing against the view that Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton were engaged ina battle for mastery over their predecessors, Dr Burrow reveals how they transformed they received intrepreations of past epic in order to draw closer to the narrative forms of their classical forebears.