Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean

Writing British Heritage in Ancient Lands

Lindsey N. Chappell

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009469777
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to fully recover and explore the region's centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms 'heritage discourse' – narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity – across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I “Civis Romanus Sum”: A Global Imperial Model
• Coda to Part I La Libertà, Unchained
• Part II “We Are All Greeks”: Forging an Anglo-Hellenic Cultural Heritage
• Coda to Part II Whitewashing Hellas
• Part III “Kindred with the Mummy”: Rewriting the Holy Land
• Coda to Part III Unholy Land
• Conclusion: The Temporal Forms of British Heritage Discourse
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index