Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope

by David Hopkins

Overview

Conversing with Antiquity collects, in a substantially revised and updated form, studies of the reception of the classics by English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by one of the leading scholars in the field. A new Introduction locates the book's investigations within the context of current debates between aestheticians and cultural historians about the reception of classical culture. Where some recent studies have regarded English poets' dealings with the classics as acts of 'appropriation', or even 'colonialization', David Hopkins emphasizes the element of dialogic give-and-take in the relationship between these poets and their classical peers. He argues that, rather than simply 'updating' or 'assimilating' the classics to their own cultural norms, poets such as Abraham Cowley, Lucy Hutchinson, Thomas Creech, John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope engaged in trans-historical conversation with Greek and Roman poets, in which self-discovery and self-transcendence were as important as any simple 'accommodation' of ancient texts to modern tastes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199560349
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2010
Series:	Classical Presences
Pages:	343
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Hopkins, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Bristol

David Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reception as Conversation1. 'The English Homer: Shakespeare, Longinus, and English 'Neoclassicism'2. Cowley's Horatian Mice3. The English Voices of Lucretius, from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good4. 'If he were living, and an Englishman': Translation Theory in the Age of Dryden5. Dryden and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal6. Dryden's 'Baucis and Philemon'7. Nature's Laws and Man's: Dryden's 'Cinyras and Myrrha'8. Dryden and Ovid's 'Wit out of Season': 'The Twelfth Book of Ovid his Metamorphoses' and 'Ceyx and Alcyone'9. Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature: Dryden's 'Of the Pythagorean Philosophy'10. Some Varieties of Pope's Classicism11. Pope's Trojan Geography12. Colonization, Closure, or Creative Dialogue? The Case of Pope's Iliad

Editorial Reviews

"This is very interesting, and perhaps it must be even more interesting to those of us who feel that "a casual perusal of the Latin" is beyond us. The gloss that Hopkins offers is more than welcome to anyone who is interested in studying these poems." —George E. Haggerty, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"This is a welcome and in fact valuable publication that will be widely appreciated by those interested in classical reception in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."—Dan Hooley, University of Missouri

From the Publisher