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The interest of Anglo-Irish literature is not only that its canon includes a high proportion of literary giants - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett - but also that it exemplifies the problematics of literature in a context of social and cultural tension. Irish literary history has often been studied under precisely that aspect: as the literature of a country in a marginal, colonial yet intra-European position; a country where a variety of cultural traditions (Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Presbyterian) have coexisted in an uneasy relationship; a country with intense social and economic divisions. These infrastructural tensions are not mere background or part of the context, but have been explicitly themat...
THE VICTORIANS & ANCIENT ROME Norman Vance has written the first full-length study of the impact on Victorian Britain of the history and literature of ancient Rome. His comprehensive account shows how not only scholars and poets but also engineers, soldiers, scientists and politicians gained inspiration from the writing, theory and practice of their Roman predecessors. The Roman theme is traced in nineteenth-century painting and music as well as literature and political discussion. There are chapters on the imaginative influence throughout the nineteenth century of five major Roman poets, framed by other chapters on Rome and European revolutions, nineteenth-century versions of Roman history, fictions of Rome, imperialism and decadence. Attention is also paid to the influence of developments in archaeology both at Rome and Pompeii and at Romano-British sites. Professor Vance provides a fascinating account of the sense of connection Victorian Britain felt with the Roman experience, a connection made the more complex because Britain had once been a Roman colony and because Christianity took hold and spread under the Roman Empire.
A Companion to the Classical Tradition accommodates the pressing need for an up-to-date introduction and overview of the growing field of reception studies. A comprehensive introduction and overview of the classical tradition - the interpretation of classical texts in later centuries Comprises 26 newly commissioned essays from an international team of experts Divided into three sections: a chronological survey, a geographical survey, and a section illustrating the connections between the classical tradition and contemporary theory
Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries. Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts...
This groundbreaking book explores the role 19th century Irish Catholic authors played in forging the creation of modern Irish literature. As such it offers a unique tour of Ireland’s literary landscape, from early origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to the transformative zenith wrought by James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Emer Nolan observes that contemporary Irish literature is steeped in the ambitions and internal conflicts of a previously captive Irish Catholic culture that came into its own with the narrative art form. He revisits, with keen insights, the prescient and influential songs, poems, and prose of Thomas Moore. He also points out that Moore’s wildly successful work helped create an audience for authors to come, i.e. John and Michael Banim, William Carleton and the popular novelists Gerald Griffin and Charles Kickham. An innovative aspect of this study is the author’s exploration of the relationship between James Joyce and Irish culture and his nineteenth-century Irish Catholic predecessors and their political and national passions. It is, in effect, a telling look at the future history of Irish fiction.
This study seeks to develop a new context for reading later Victorian fiction and for understanding the process of 'secularization'. Norman Vance explores how the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward, and Rider Haggard acquired greater cultural centrality, just as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining, and offered a new forum for the exploration of religious and moral themes.
Drawing on recent theoretical developments in gender and men?s studies, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities shows how the ideas and models of masculinity were constructed in the work of artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Paying particular attention to the representation of non-normative or alternative masculinities, the contributors take up the multiple versions of masculinity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti?s paintings and poetry, masculine violence in William Morris?s late romances, nineteenth-century masculinity and the medical narrative in Ford Madox Brown?s Cromwell on His Farm, accusations of ?perversion? directed at Edward Burne-Jones?s work, performative masculinity and William Bell Scott?s frescoes, the representations of masculinity in Pre-Raphaelite illustration, aspects of male chastity in poetry and art, Tannh?er as a model for Victorian manhood, and masculinity and British imperialism in Holman Hunt?s The Light of the World. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the plurality of masculinities that pervade the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In the mid-1880s The Builder, an influential British architectural journal, published an article characterizing Renaissance architecture as a corrupt bastardization of the classical architecture of Greece and Rome. By the turn of the century, however, the same journal praised the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi as the ?Christopher Columbus of modern architecture.? Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture, 1850-1914 examines these conflicting characterizations and reveals how the writing of architectural history was intimately tied to the rise of the professional architect and the formalization of architectural education in late nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on a bro...
This is the first book to establish how classical antiquity and the study of the Bible together formed Victorian ideas of the past, and consequently informed the very construction of modernity. Its multi-disciplinary approach will be valuable to scholars and graduate students in numerous disciplines across the arts and humanities.