Romantic Antiquity

This work argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produced a changed understandings of historicity itself.

In the course of the eighteenth century, discoveries ranging from Tahiti to Pompeii initiated a scientific turn in the study of the past. Seeking a formal language to display these new findings, Romantic-era plate books presented a wide array of objects as ancient relics. This proliferation of antiquities, a product of old affinities between natural history and antiquarianism, provided new material for the formation of archaeology, geology, anthropology, and other modern disciplines. Sciences of Antiquity traces the production of five scholarly plate books on subjects of major literary and scientific interest at the time: South Pacific voyaging, Mount Vesuvius, ancient Greek vases, monuments in English cathedrals, and the geology of southeast England. Focusing on illustrators, fieldworkers, and ghostwriters associated with this type of scholarly publication, Heringman explores how the expertise acquired by these largely self-educated intellectuals precipitated a major shift in the way research was done - from patronage to professionalism. Their scholarship and technical skills demanded recognition, sparking conflicts over the division of labour and the role of institutions such as the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Ambitious, collaborative plate books, such as The Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities (1776) and Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain (1799), forged a broader and deeper perception of antiquity as extending far beyond the Greco-Roman world.

Platonic love is a concept that has profoundly shaped Western literature, philosophy and intellectual history for centuries. First developed in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, it was taken up by subsequent thinkers in antiquity, entered the theological debates of the Middle Ages, and played a key role in the reception of Neoplatonism and the etiquette of romantic relationships during the Italian Renaissance. In this wide-ranging reference work, a leading team of international specialists examines the Platonic distinction between higher and lower forms of eros, the role of the higher form in the ascent of the soul and the concept of Beauty. They also treat the possibilities for friendship and interpersonal love in a Platonic framework, as well as the relationship between love, rhetoric and wisdom. Subsequent developments are explored in Plutarch, Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Ficino, della Mirandola, Castiglione and the contra amorem tradition.

Gothic literature imagines the return of ghosts from the past. But what about the ghosts of the classical past? Spectres of Antiquity is the first full-length study to describe the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and the Gothic novels, poetry, and drama of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than simply representing the opposite of classical aesthetics and ideas, the Gothic emerged from an awareness of the lingering power of antiquity. The Gothic reflects a new and darker vision of the ancient world: no longer inspiring modernity through its examples, antiquity has become a ghost, haunting contemporary minds rather than guiding them. Through readings of works by authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Brockden Brown, and Mary Shelley, Spectres of Antiquity argues that these authors' plots and ideas preserve the remembered traces of Greece and Rome. James Uden provides evidence for many allusions to ancient texts that have never previously been noted in scholarship, and he offers an accessible guide both to the Gothic genre and to the classical world to which it responds. In fascinating and compelling detail, Spectres of Antiquity rewrites the history of the Gothic, demonstrating that the genre was haunted by a far deeper sense of history than has previously been assumed.

This ambitious book addresses questions concerning an old theme - the rise and fall of ancient civilization - but does so from a distinctive theoretical perspective by taking its lead from the work of the great German sociologist Max Weber.

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840 provides the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction; poetry; drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the relationship between literature and architecture is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains, to date, no monograph-length study of the intriguing and complex interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only the most cursory of treatments in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. In addressing this gap in contemporary scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic-architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of canonical and lesser-known texts and writers. Correspondingly, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were to a certain extent shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its 'survivalist' and 'revivalist' forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was always much more than a matter of style. Incarnating, for better or for worse, the memory of a vanished 'Gothic' age in the modern, enlightened present, Gothic architecture, be it ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation's past—a notable 'visionary' turn, as the antiquary John Pinkerton put it in 1788, in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. The volume establishes a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, and argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

In 850 analytical articles, this two-volume set explores the developments that influenced the profound changes in thought and sensibility during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopedia provides readers with a clear, detailed, and accurate reference source on the literature, thought, music, and art of the period, demonstrating the rich interplay of international influences and cross-currents at work; and to explore the many issues raised by the very concepts of Romantic and Romanticism.

This book examines the theme of lost paradise in Lieder by nineteenth-century composers including Franz Schubert.