Books > History > British & Irish history
|
Buy Now
Celestial Aspirations - Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,030
Discovery Miles 10 300
|
|
Celestial Aspirations - Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art (Hardcover)
Series: E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
|
A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight
preoccupied early modern British writers and artists Between the
late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British
imagination-poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and
religious-displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent
and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how
British literature and art during that period exploited classical
representations of these soaring themes-through philosophical,
scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the
disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler.
From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens,
Verrio and Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the
history, ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world
received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England,
narratives of ascent appear on the grandest scale in Milton's
Paradise Lost, an epic built around a Christian plot of falling and
rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English
poetry. Examining the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of
Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie considers the Whig sublime, as well
as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he
looks at motivations both public and private for aspiring to the
heavens-as a reward for political and military achievement on the
one hand, and as a goal of individual intellectual and spiritual
exertion on the other. Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing
look at how creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and
space in the early modern era.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.