This book argues for a new attention to the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to poetry. Charles Martindale explores ways in which Kant's aesthetic theory, as set out in the Critique of Judgement, remains of fundamental importance for the modern critic. He argues that the Kantian "judgement of taste" is not formalist, and explores the relationship between the aesthetic and the political in our responses to art. Finally he urges the value of aesthetic criticism as pioneered by Walter Pater and others. The (mainly Latin) poems discussed are all translated, and the book will...

Although a third of his plays are set in the ancient world and he constantly used classical mythology, history, and ideas, Shakespeare received a simple grammar school education and did not have a scholar's knowledge of the classics. The critical implications of this are the subject of Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity . Against a recent academic tendency to exaggerate Shakespeare's learning, the authors investigate how he used his comparatively restricted knowledge to create, for example, an unusually convincing picture of Rome, and analyse, by presenting us with careful readings of...

This book applies some of the procedures of modern critical theory to the interpretation of Latin poetry. The author argues for an approach that sees the meaning of a text as always and necessarily involved in the process of "reception," that is the way it has been read and interpreted from the time of its composition down to the present day. A study of its reception-history facilitates novel and more profitable ways of reading. He illustrates his approach with exemplary readings of Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Lucan.

This book is a study of Ovid and his poetry as a cultural phenomenon.

This book, first published in 1993 and a celebration of the bimillennium of Horace's death and a successor to Ovid Renewed (Cambridge University Press, 1988), explores in a balanced and comprehensive way, the presence of Horace in English letters and culture from the Renaissance onwards, in the form of a series of critical essays. It shows that there has been a continuous interest in Horace throughout the modern period, whereas it is often supposed that Horace's influence was only of central importance in the eighteenth century. Horace indeed is a major (if often hidden) element in the...

This volume provides, for the first time, an extensive and wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between Romanticism and Roman antiquity. Encompassing literature, music, sculpture, film, history, politics, and scholarship from across Europe and the US, it assesses the influence ancient Roman culture has had upon Romanticism, and the influence Romanticism has in turn had upon our understanding of the ancient Romans.
Arranged in three sections - Romanticisms, Romantics, and Reception - the 20 contributions in this volume assess various shared themes and motifs, case studies from the...

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of...