Celestial Aspirations

Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art

Philip Hardie

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Hardback

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English

Princeton University Press
01 July 2022

Literary studies: classical, early & medieval; British & Irish history

Series: E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series

A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artists

Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination - poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious-displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British literature and art during that period exploited classical representations of these soaring themes-through philosophical, scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler.

From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio and Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the history, ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent appear on the grandest scale in Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic built around a Christian plot of falling and rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Examining the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie considers the Whig sublime, as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he looks at motivations both public and private for aspiring to the heavens-as a reward for political and military achievement on the one hand, and as a goal of individual intellectual and spiritual exertion on the other.

Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing look at how creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and space in the early modern era.

By: Philip Hardie
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691197869
ISBN 10: 0691197865
Series: E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 01 July 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Philip Hardie is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor Emeritus of Latin at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Rumour and Renown and The Last Trojan Hero.