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Prophecy, Populism, Propaganda in the 'Octavia'
In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome—as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn’t write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out – like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.
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Johan David Åkerblad (1763–1819) contributed to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic and is known as a predecessor of Jean-François Champollion. This intellectual biography offers a new and less heroic interpretation of the first reading of the Egyptian scripts. Åkerblad, an exceptional linguist, was a diplomat and orientalist who spent several decades living in the Ottoman Empire, France and Italy. Of humble birth, he was a supporter of the French Revolution – something that stymied his career. His life cannot be understood in a purely Swedish national framework, and this study firmly situates him as an international scholar. The book discusses European expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean during the tumultuous decades around the year 1800, and traces Åkerblad’s momentous life in relation to the debates on ‘orientalism,’ the tradition of classical studies and the history of science.
Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal all figure in Bartsch's shrewd analysis of historical and literary responses to the brute facts of empire; even the Panegyricus of Pliny the Younger now appears as a reaction against the widespread awareness of dissimulation.
From the Iliad to Aristophanes, from the gospel of Matthew to Augustine, Greek and Latin texts are constellated with descriptive images of dreams. This cultural history of dreams in antiquity draws on both contemporary post-Freudian science and careful critiques of the ancient texts. Harris takes an elusive subject and writes about it with rigor and precision, reminding us of specificities, contexts, and changing attitudes through history.
Thorvaldsens Museum opened in central Copenhagen in 1848. The great Danish sculptor had arranged to donate his own works of art and his collections to the city, provided that the museum be built for the purpose; it would become his tomb. The Museum was decorated with a colourful frieze depicting the triumphant arrival of Thorvaldsen and his magnificent works of art in Copenhagen from the artist's studio in Rome. The dramatic frieze, designed by the Danish artist Jørgen Sonne, made a big splash at the time, and has captivated visitors ever since. In this learned and lively study of the Museum and its frieze, John Henderson shows how the frieze takes inspiration from classical models, including the Parthenon and Roman monuments, in delivering the finest neoclassical art, and its cosmopolitan European culture, to the attention of a newly modernized public. This beautifully illustrated book breaks new ground in Danish History of Art, bringing an important and unique Danish work of art to an international audience with the blessing of the Museum.
This book explores various forms of cultural influence and exchange between Britain and the Nordic countries in the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, these essays not only constitute a substantial and innovative contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries, but also describe a pattern of cultural encounter which was predicated upon exchange and a sense of commonality rather than upon the perception of difference or alterity which has so often been discerned by critical descriptions of British romantic-period engagements with non-British cultures. The volume ought to appeal to a broad and genuinely international academic audience with interests in eighteenth-century and romantic-period culture in Britain and Scandinavia as well as to undergraduates taking courses in eighteenth-century, romantic, and Scandinavian studies.