Sublime Cosmos in Graeco-Roman Literature and Its Reception

Intersections of Myth, Science and History

David Christenson, Cynthia White, David Christenson, Cynthia White

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781350344679
• eBook ISBN: 9781350344693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

The essays collected in this volume examine manifestations of our sublime cosmos in ancient literature and its reception. Individual themes include religious mystery; calendrical and cyclical thinking as ordering principles of human experience; divine birth and the manifold nature of divinity (both awesome and terrifying); contemplation of the sky and meteorological (ir)regularity; fears associated with overpowering natural and anthropogenic events; and the aspirations and limitations of human expression. In texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the volume's chapters apply diverse critical methods and approaches that engage with sublimity in various aesthetic, agential and metaphysical aspects. The ancient texts – epic, dramatic, historiographic and lyric – treated here are rooted in a remote world where, within a framework of (perceived) celestial order, literature, myth and science still communicated profoundly, a tradition that continued in literary receptions of these ancient works.

This volume honours the intellectual legacy of Thomas D. Worthen, a scholar whose expertise and insights cut across multiple disciplines, and who influenced and inspired students and colleagues at the University of Arizona, USA, for over three decades. Beyond clarifying temporally and culturally distant contemplations of the human universe, these essays aim to inform the continuing sense of wonder and horror at the sublime heights and depths of our ever-changing cosmos.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Sublime Epic
• 2 Homer’s Odyssey and the Mystery of Time
• 3 Helen, Paris and the Philosophical ἔρως: Love, Strife and Sublime Contact from Homer to Plato
• 4 The Hard-Break at Hesiod, Theogony 200
• 5 Visions and Memories of Lucretius in Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones
• 6 Vergil’s bougonia Rite in Georgics 4: Its Nature, Sources, Origins and Possible Link to the Indo-European Myth of Creation
• Part II Celestial Drama
• 7 An Early Morning Person? Aristophanes and His Star-Studded Comic Prologues
• 8 Frighteningly Funny Gods: Comic and Cosmic Space in Plautus
• Part III History, Historiography and the Cosmos
• 9 Day Suddenly Became Night: Eclipses and the Sublime in Greek Historiography
• 10 The Cosmic Barrier: The Isthmus of Corinth in Imperial Latin Poetry
• Part IV Reception
• 11 Reading the Classics in Plague-Ridden England, 1629–1722
• 12 ‘Solution Sweet’ and Keats’s Poetic Ideal: Erotic and Nuptial Imagery in The Eve of St. Agnes
• Index
• Copyright