Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies: Ancient and Early Modern Perspectives

Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies provides a new analysis of the significance of time in Classical and early modern literature, demonstrating that literary temporality continually intervenes in questions of ontology, hierarchy and politics. Examining a diverse range of texts from Homeric epic to eighteenth-century poems on the Last Judgement, this collection of essays contends that temporality in literature sits at the heart of how authors from antiquity through to the early modern period understood and negotiated the structures that shaped their lives and may shape lives to come. Approaching the topic through four themes, the essays in this volume highlight the ways in which time is construed as relational, contestable and politically inflected. The authors show that variations in temporalities enable texts to critique the interactions or tensions between tradition and change, agency and determinism, social system and individual experience. The result is a refreshing approach to literary figurations of time that responds to the recent 'temporal turn' in the humanities, engages with current critical trends (such as ontological analysis and ecological criticism), and opens up an exciting new direction for future research on the connection between time, text, and context.

Table of Contents:
List of Contributors Introduction, Bobby Xinyue (King's College London, UK) Part I. The Presence of Time 1. Dialectic at a Standstill: Homer, Image and the Nature of Temporality, Ahuvia Khane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) 2. Historical Ontology, Texts and Interpretation: Protagorean Reflections, Duncan Kennedy (University of Bristol, UK) 3. Roman Temporalities of Presence, James Ker (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Part II. Time, Space, and Relations in Greek Literature 4.'… how you first went over the earth': Interactions of Human and Divine Time in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Anke Walter (University of Newcastle, UK) 5. The Apotheosis of Time: Challenging Tradition and Anachromism in Pherecydes' Heptamychos, Susannah Ashton (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) 6. Pindar and the Nature of Contemplation, David Fearn (University of Warwick, UK) Part III. Temporal Patterns and the Politics of Latin Literature 7. Rivers as the Embodiment of Disrupted Time: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Ecological Chronotopes, and the Apocalypse, Rebecca Batty (University of Nottingham, UK) 8. More Than a Lifetime: Temporal Patterns in Roman Biography - Nepos, Tacitus, Suetonius, Martin Stöckinger (University of Cologne, Germany) 9. Short Long/Long Short: Brevity, Power and Epigrammatic Temporality, Tom Geue (The Australian National University, Australia) Part IV. The End of Time 10. The Day of Reckoning: Seneca's Epistolary Time, Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) 11. Endangering the Christian Age: Ovid's Fasti and the Annunciation in Renaissance Poetic Calendars, Bobby Xinyue (King's College London, UK) 12. Respice finem. Fast-Forwarding to the End of Time in Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Milton and Early 18th Century Poems on the Last Judgement, Philip Hardie (University of Cambridge, UK) Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Bobby Xinyue is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. His research is on Latin literature of the Augustan age and its reception in the early modern period. He has published journal articles and book-chapters on Cicero, Virgil and Propertius, as well as on Renaissance Latin poets such as Battista Mantovano. He has recently co-edited Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics (Bloomsbury, 2019); and is currently one of the series editors for the Bloomsbury Neo-Latin Series. His current research project examines the reception of Ovid's Fasti in the Renaissance.

Review :
A stimulating set of reflections on time as it is crafted and conceived across a range literary and philosophical genres. This is a book made to last.