Description

Conversing with Antiquity gathers together a selection of revised previously published articles by one of the foremost scholars of Renaissance and early modern English literature, contextualizing them with a specially written Introduction. David Hopkins explores the interaction between English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and those of ancient Greece and Rome, emphasizing the element of exchange and dialogue between the two. Hopkins stresses the ways in which English poets were changed by their engagement with the Classics. He also suggests that valuable new light is cast on classical literature itself by English poets' responses. His study encompasses a number of major classical poets (Homer, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal), and with both mainstream canonical English poets (Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope) and some of their more interesting contemporaries (Abraham Cowley, Lucy Hutchinson, Thomas Creech, Henry Higden, Christopher Smart).

Features

• Emphasizes reception of the classics as trans-historical dialogue and conversation
• Challenges views of poetic translation as mere assimilation, colonization, or accommodation, identifying its role as creative criticism of the original
• Engages with debates about the formation of the canon of English literature, both in terms of the writers selected for study, and the areas of their works which are privileged in this regard

Product Details

360 pages; 2 in-text illus.; ISBN13: 978-0-19-956034-9ISBN10: 0-19-956034-X

About the Author(s)