Browsing by Subject "Battle of the books"

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The fall of the house of fame : text, immortality, and the ancient-modern controversy
(2022-12-02) Hemstreet, Jennifer, 1983-; Bertelsen, Lance; Rumrich, John; Hedrick, Elizabeth; Beutner, Katharine
This dissertation conducts a study of the reception history of classical Greco-Roman models of literary immortality and examines their declining rhetorical power during the British Long Eighteenth Century. Analyzing a selection of Classical, Early Modern, and Enlightenment works and the intertextual relationships between them, this study argues that ancient models of literary immortality, which for centuries had rested on increasingly unstable rhetorical structures, reached a crisis in the early part of the eighteenth century, with consequences for the later history of both poetry and literary criticism. Chapter I introduces the methods and aims of the study and outlines the topics to be covered. Chapter II presents the longstanding Ancient-Modern controversy as a historical context for understanding the “battle of the books” and adjacent eighteenth-century texts, and examines the inherent paradoxes of the humanist project of revitalizing the ancients, with a focus on Petrarch and his reception of the letters of Cicero. Chapter III considers the “monumental” qualities of Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame and the poem’s relationship to classical Greek and Roman eternizing poetry. Close-readings of poems by Pindar and Horace illustrate how these poets treated their works as analogous to physical monuments, epitaphs, and other memorial spaces, and how memory is connected with location and intertext. Chapter IV explores the evolution of the concept of fame in parallel with changing conceptions of the self, as well as changing views of language and translation theory, from the ancient world through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and shows how efforts to capture individual selfhood with greater precision, depth, and vividness were symptomatic of a trend toward viewing the self or soul as essentially incommunicable. This chapter suggests that the outwardly trivial “battle of the books” of the eighteenth century was not concerned merely with the patriarchal status of the ancients or the personal fame of modern poets, but rather signified a critical reevaluation of the viability of text to communicate across changing cultures, languages, and worldviews. Chapter V reviews the conclusions of the foregoing chapters, and looks forward to conceptions of textual eternization after the Enlightenment.