Romantic Antiquity

Abstract

Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle‐18th century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has arisen in the context of the articulation of a modernity distinguished either by its full‐scale rejection of classical precedents or by its embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical understanding produced a changed conceptualization of the Roman past for Romantic writers, and transformative because Rome became the locus for new understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book asserts the centrality of Rome in a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti‐democratic, or “right royal.” By exposing how Roman references help structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacts fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book initiates a major overhaul in how we understand the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle.