The Other Virgil `Pessimistic' Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture

by Kallendorf, Craig

• ISBN13: 9780199212361
• ISBN10: 0199212368
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.

Author Biography

Craig Kallendorf is Professor of English and Classics, Texas A&M University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
Marginalization	p. 17
Laudatory Epic and the Nature of Power in the Early Renaissance	p. 17
Virgil and the Challenge to Laudatory Epic	p. 30
Filelfo's Sphortias: Imitation as Resistance	p. 50
Colonization	p. 67
Ercilla's La Araucana: Epic and the Voice of the Other	p. 77
The Tempest: Drama and the Valorization of the Other	p. 102
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Lyric and the Female Other between Two Worlds	p. 126
Revolution	p. 138
Milton's Paradise Lost: From Commonwealth to Restoration	p. 138
Joel Barlow, Virgil, and the American Revolution	p. 169
Le Plat's Virgile en France: Revolution and Repression	p. 196
Conclusion	p. 213
Manuscripts of Filelfo's Sphortias	p. 228
Filelfo's Virgilian Studies	p. 231
Select Bibliography	p. 233
Index	p. 243
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