Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil


Book Description

Examines how Virgil is represented in early modern England, particularly in Jonson's and Shakespeare's writings.




School-Boys Heroes


Book Description




Virgil


Book Description

Virgil by Philip Hardie revisits the topics of the first New Survey in the Classics published in 1967. This latest Survey explores how literary approaches have changed over the last thirty years, with individual chapters on Ecloques, Georgics and The Aenid, and style.










The Last Trojan Hero


Book Description

The resonant opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid rank among the most famous and consistently recited verses to have been passed down to later ages by antiquity. And after The Odyssey and the Iliad, Virgil's masterpiece is arguably the greatest classical text in the whole of Western literature. This sinuous and richly characterised epic vitally influenced th poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Milton. The doomed love of Dido and Aeneas inspired Purcell, while for T.S. Eliot Virgil's poem was 'the classic of all Europe'. The poet's stirring tale of a refugee Trojan prince, 'torn from Libyan waves' to found a new homeland in Italy, has provided much fertile material for writings on colonialism and for discourses of ethic and national identity. The Aeneid has even been viewed as a template and source of justification for British and European imperialisms and for American nation-building. In his major and much anticipated new book Philip Hardie explores the many remarkable afterlives- ancient, medieval and modern- of the Aeneid in literature, music, politics, the visual arts and film. The Last Trojan Hero, by one of Virgil's leading interpreters, put continually fresh and surprising perspectives on one of the outstanding works of civilization. Placing the Aeneid on a broad artistic and historical canvas, it shows with elegance, originality and creative insight how and in what ways this remarkably durable text continues so powerfully to capture the cultural imagination and why it still speaks to us over a gulf of centuries.







Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia


Book Description

Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia is an introduction to the Eclogues, based on sound scholarship but also personally felt and addressed to a popular audience. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of Virgil's early poems, discusses each eclogue in some detail, and offers a new and challenging interpretation of the collection as a whole. The ten eclogues are shown to be a young poet's attempt at self-understanding. Their symmetrical arrangement is a journey inward toward the central experience of death, and a journey back toward rebirth and the writing of larger and greater works.




The Edinburgh Review


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English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil C. 1400-1550


Book Description

English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550 reassesses how the spread of Renaissance humanism in England impacted the reception of Virgil. It begins with the first signs of humanist influence in the fifteenth century, and ends at the height of the English Renaissance during the mid-Tudor period. This period witnessed the first extant English translations of Virgil's Aeneid, by William Caxton (1490), Gavin Douglas (1513), and the Earl of Surrey (c. 1543). It also marked the first printings of Virgil's works in England by Richard Pynson (c. 1515) and Wynkyn de Worde (1510s-1520s). Through a fine-grained analysis of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions, Matthew Day questions how and to what extent Renaissance humanism impacted readers' and translators' approaches to Virgil. Building on current scholarship in the fields of book history, classical reception, and translation studies, it draws attention to substantial continuities between the medieval and humanist reception of Virgil's works. Humanist study of Virgil, and indeed of classical poetry more generally, continued to draw many of its aims, methods, and conventions from well-established medieval traditions of learning. In emphasizing the very gradual pace of humanist development and the continuous influence of medieval scholarship, the book comes to a more qualified view of how humanism did and (just as importantly) did not affect Virgilian reading and translation. While recognizing humanist innovations and discoveries, it gives due attention to the understudied, yet far more numerous examples of consistency and traditionalism.