Virgil Made English

This study traces the steady decline of classical authority in English literature from the mid-seventeenth century and the role of translation in shifting the emphasis away the classical learning. The author focuses on Virgil, once the most revered of poets but also explores the fate of some of his fellow Ancients.

"Caldwell's Virgil Made English is a first-rate study that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the decline of the classics in eighteenth-century literature. Well-researched and well-argued, it is as provocative as it is rigorous." - Robert Markley, Romano Professorial Scholar, Department of English, Unit for Criticism and Theory, University of Illinois

"This is a superb account of Virgil s declining authority from post-Reformation England to colonial America. Sifting through a commanding knowledge of the many editions, translations, miscellanies, parodies of, and keys to Virgil, Caldwell masterfully demonstrates how modern literary activity emerged from the tension between the inherited habit of drawing on Virgil and the increasing need to supplant his outmoded heroic tradition with a new concern for the novel and the domestic. Caldwell s sharply defined dialectic between the receding claims of Virgilian authority and the increasingly clamorous imperatives of contemporary history make Virgil Made English a key sourcebook for all studies of Restoration and eighteenth-century literary culture." - Anna Battigelli, Professor of English, SUNY Plattsburgh

Autorentext
TANYA M CALDWELL is Associate Professor of English, Georgia State University, USA.

Inhalt
Introduction Virgil in the 1650s and 1660s: Dismantling Augustanism Virgil in the 1670s and 1680s: The Emperor's New Clothes Virgil, 1688-1700: A Watershed of English Literature Virgil, 1700-1760s: Redefining Neoclassicism The Legacy: Tradition Metamorphosed Bibliography