Virgil and the Augustan Reception
Cambridge University Press, 3/15/2001
EAN 9780521782883, ISBN10: 0521782880
Hardcover, 346 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the last two millennia. The author focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which reasserts the 'Augustan' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of 'textual cleansing', philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
the critical landscape
1. Virgil and Augustus
2. Virgil and the poets
Horace, Ovid and Lucan
3. Other voices in Servius
schooldust of the ages
4. Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation
5. Dido and her translators
6. Philology and textual cleansing
7. Virgil in a cold climate
fascist reception
8. Beyond the borders of Eboli
anti-fascist reception
9. Critical end games
Bibliography
Index.