Both an appreciation of an architectural masterpiece and an exploration of the building’s shifting meanings, Jenkyns captures the voices of those who have described Westminster Abbey’s forms, moods, and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James; we see how rulers have made used it, from kings to prime ministers.
The writings of the Greeks and Romans form the bedrock of Western culture. Inventing the molds for histories, tragedies, and philosophies, while pioneering radical new forms of epic and poetry, the Greeks and Romans created the literary world we still inhabit today. Writing with verve and insight, distinguished classicist Richard Jenkyns explores a thousand years of classical civilization, carrying readers from the depths of the Greek dark ages through the glittering heights of Rome's empire. Jenkyns begins with Homer and the birth of epic poetry before exploring the hypnotic poetry of Pindar, Sappho, and others from the Greek dark ages. Later, in Athens's classical age, Jenkyns shows the radical nature of Sophocles's choice to portray Ajax as a psychologically wounded warrior, how Aeschylus developed tragedy, and how Herodotus, in "inventing history," brought to narrative an epic and tragic quality. We meet the strikingly modern figure of Virgil, struggling to mirror epic art in an age of empire, and experience the love poems of Catullus, who imbued verse with obsessive passion as never before. Even St. Paul and other early Christian writers are artfully grounded here in their classical literary context. A dynamic and comprehensive introduction to Greek and Roman literature, Jenkyns's Classical Literature is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the classics -- and the extraordinary origins of Western culture. "There is scarcely anything on which he does not offer an original aperç sometimes illuminating, sometimes simply provocative, but always worth reading... Jenkyns's view of ancient literature is Olympian." -- G.W. Bowersock, The New York Review of Books
This study delights in Jane Austen's craft and wit, revealing the subtlety, depth and innovation that lies within her writing. Richard Jenkyns explores the development of her style, storytelling and characterisation, her technical prowess, and her place in comparison with her contemporaries.
God, Space, and City in the Roman Imagination is a unique exploration of the relationship between the ancient Romans' visual and literary cultures and their imagination. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources from all levels of Roman society, it analyses how the Romans used, conceptualized, viewed, and moved around their city.
This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity. It is exact and patient in its probing for nuance and detail, but also bold, wide, and original in its scope. It combines the study of Virgil with the study of attitudes to nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.
A Global Warming Forum: Scientific, Economic, and Legal Overview provides an integrated, thematic approach to major critical aspects of the problem presented by global warming. Scientific issues; economics; natural resource management concerns; and legal, educational, and policy considerations are discussed within the context of arriving at solutions to global warming problems. Data and information is derived from diverse geographic locations, especially in the case history chapters requiring the use of integrated interdisciplinary methods. Graphs and tables are used extensively throughout the text to illustrate key concepts. A Global Warming Forum: Scientific, Economic, and Legal Overview is an excellent survey for researchers in all areas of geoscience and climate assessment, including geochemistry, oceanography, climatology, and resource management.
Richard Hingley here asks the questions: What is Romanization? Was Rome the first global culture? Romanization has been represented as a simple progression from barbarism to civilization. Roman forms in architecture, coinage, language and literature came to dominate the world from Britain to Syria. Hingley argues for a more complex and nuanced view in which Roman models provided the means for provincial elites to articulate their own concerns. Inhabitants of the Roman provinces were able to develop identities they never knew they had until Rome gave them the language to express them. Hingley draws together the threads of diverse and separate study, in one sophisticated theoretical framework that spans the whole Roman Empire. Students of Rome and those with an interest in classical cultural studies will find this an invaluable mine of information.
A sparkling celebration of the genius of Jane Austen, this work takes readers on an amiable tour of Austen's fictional world, opening a window on some of the great works of literature.
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