Epic and Empire

Epic and Empire
Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691222959

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Selected Studies

Selected Studies
Author: Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1965
Genre: Europe
ISBN:

English, Latin or German. "Ernst H. Kantorowicz: bibliography of writings": p. xi-xiv. Bibliographical footnotes.

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004308237

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume brings together contributions by distinguished experts from different disciplinary fields for a multidimensional view on immersion in the visual arts and media. In the current media debate, immersion has frequently been linked to the advent of digital technology and its capacity to provide vivid sensations of being placed in or surrounded by an artificial space. The idea of ‘liquidity’ contained in this promise to plunge into another world informs wide areas of contemporary cultural imagination, referring to a myriad of phenomena that relate to experiences of uncertainty and instability, of complexity and change. Considering the fact, however, that the idea of ‘liquid’ spaces appeared long before the digital creation of augmented or virtual environments, the contributors to this volume trace its reemerging throughout the history of the visual arts and media. By focusing on selected works of painting and architecture, photography and cinema, video installation and media art, they explore the variability of immersive experiences according to the different media environments and interfaces that constitute the actual sites of historically shifting relations between media and users. Contributors are: Matthias Bauer, Jörg von Brincken, Robin Curtis, Burcu Dogramaci, Thomas Elsaesser, Ole W. Fischer, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Ursula Frohne, Henry Keazor, Matthias Krüger, Katja Kwastek, Fabienne Liptay, Karl Prümm, Martin Warnke.

The Hellenizing Muse

The Hellenizing Muse
Author: Filippomaria Pontani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 840
Release: 2021-11-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110652757

Traditionally, the history of Ancient Greek literature ends with Antiquity: after the fall of Rome, the literary works in ancient Greek generally belong to the domain of the Byzantine Empire. However, after the Byzantine refugees restored the knowledge of Ancient Greek in the west during the early humanistic period (15th century), Italian scholars (and later their French, German, Spanish colleagues) started to use Greek, a purely literary language that no one spoke, for their own texts and poems. This habit persisted with various ups and downs throughout the centuries, according to the development of Greek studies in each country. The aim of this anthology - the first one of this kind - is to give a selective overview of this kind of humanistic poetry in Ancient Greek, embracing all major regions of Europe and trying to concentrate on remarkable pieces of important poets. The ultimate goal of the book is to shed light on an important and so far mostly neglected aspect of the European heritage.

Platinotype

Platinotype
Author: Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney
Publisher:
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1898
Genre: Photography
ISBN:

Visuality/Materiality

Visuality/Materiality
Author: Divya P. Tolia-Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317001125

Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.

Virtual Voyages

Virtual Voyages
Author: Jeffrey Ruoff
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2006-01-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780822337133

DIVThe different forms that travelogues have taken (documentaries, IMAX, home movies, ethnographic films) from the 1800s to the present./div

The Uses of Humanism

The Uses of Humanism
Author: Gábor Almási
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2009-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004183647

This book is a novel attempt to understand humanism as a socially meaningful cultural idiom in Late Renaissance East Central Europe. Through an exploration of geographical regions that are relatively little known to an English reading public, it argues that late sixteenth-century East Central Europe was culturally thriving and intellectually open in the period between Copernicus and Galileo. Humanism was a dominant cluster of shared intellectual practices and cultural values that brought a number of concrete benefits both to the social-climber intellectual and to the social elite. Two exemplary case studies illustrate this thesis in substantive detail, and highlight the ambivalences and difficulties court humanists routinely faced. The protagonists Johannes Sambucus and Andreas Dudith, both born in the Kingdom of Hungary, were two of the major humanists of the Habsburg court, central figures in cosmopolitan networks of men learning and characteristic representatives of an Erasmian spirit that was struggling for survival in the face of confessionalisation. Through an analysis of their careers at court and a presentation of their self-fashioning as savants and courtiers, the book explores the social and political significance of their humanist learning and intellectual strategies.

Commerce with the Classics

Commerce with the Classics
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1997
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780472106264

A distinctive history of the traditions of reading and life in the Renaissance library, as seen in the texts of Renaissance intellectuals

Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity

Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity
Author: Asaph Ben-Tov
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2009-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047443950

The textual monuments of Greco-Roman antiquity, as is well known, were a staple of Europe’s educated classes since the Renaissance. That the Reformation ushered in a new understanding of human fate and history is equally a commonplace of modern scholarship. The present study probes attitudes towards Greek antiquity by of a group of Lutheran humanists. Concentrating on Philipp Melanchthon, several of his colleagues and students, and a broader Melanchthonian milieu, a Lutheran understanding of Pagan and Christian Greek antiquity is traced in its sixteenth century context, positing it within the framework of Protestant universal history, pedagogical concerns, and the newly made acquaintance with Byzantine texts and post-Byzantine Greeks – demonstrating the need to historicize Antiquity itself in Renaissance studies and beyond.