Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book 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.

William Gilpin: a classical eye for the picturesque / Margaret Doody -- Phillis Wheatley and the political work of Ekphrasis / Mary Louise Kete -- 'Past ruin'd Ilion": the classical ideal and the romantic voice in Landor's poetry / Steven Stryer -- "Larger the shadows": Longfellow's translation of Virgil's Eclogue 1 / Christoph Irmscher -- Changes of address: epic invocation in anglophone romanticism / Herbert F. Tucker -- Thoreau's epic ambitions: "A walk to Wachusett" and the persistence of the classics in an age of science / K.P. Van Anglen -- Pilgrimage and epiphany: the psychological and political dynamics of Margaret Fuller's mythmaking / Jeffrey Steele -- Remaking the republic of letters: James McCune Smith and the classical tradition / John Stauffer -- "In the face of the fire": Melville's Prometheus, classical and romantic contexts / John P. McWilliams -- Coleridge's Rome / Jonathan Sachs -- The classics and American political rhetoric in a democratic and romantic age / Carl J. Richard -- Gibbon, Virgil, and the Victorians: appropriating the matter of Rome and renovating the epic career / Edward Adams -- The other classics: Hebrew shapes British and American literature and culture / James Engell.

Print version record.

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