Re-establishes the enduring presence and value of classical literature in the Romantic era
The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age reveals the extent to which writers now called romantic venerate and use classical texts to transform lyric and narrative poetry, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race and slavery, as well as to provide models for their own literary careers and personal lives. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics--including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded as a classical language--play a major role in what becomes labeled romanticism only later in the nineteenth century.
The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but subtle interpenetration and mutual transformation. While romantic writers regard what they are doing as new, this attitude in no way prompts them to abjure valuable lessons of genre, expression, and judgment flowing from the classical authors they love. This volume disturbs categories that have become too settled.
Key Features
- Includes in almost equal proportion British and American authors and is transatlantic in scope
- Moves well beyond the five canonical British romantic poets, on whom considerable work has been done concerning their relation to classical literature
- Includes studies of African American and women writers
About the Author: K. P. Van Anglen is Senior Lecturer on English, retired, at Boston University. He is author of The New England Milton (1993), co-editor of Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (2008), and editor of the Translations volume (1986) in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, which includes Thoreau's English versions of plays traditionally ascribed to Aeschylus, and his renderings of parts of Pindar's Odes and the Anacreontea. Van Anglen edited "Simplify, Simplify" and Other Quotations from Henry David Thoreau (1996). He recently coedited Thoreau at Two Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, essays commissioned by the Thoreau Society to celebrate the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth.
James Engell is Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has spent his career teaching at Harvard University where he has chaired the Departments of English and of Comparative Literature as well as the Degree Program in History & Literature. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, author of four books and numerous articles, as well as a contributor to and editor of nine volumes, his interests embrace the Enlightenment and Romanticism, rhetoric, and environmental issues. He studied classical literature with Glen Bowersock and Wendell Clausen and contributed the entry for Wordsworth to The Virgil Encyclopedia.
