The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought - Hardcover

Silk, Michael; Gildenhard, Ingo; Barrow, Rosemary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405155493 ISBN 13: 9781405155496

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014

Synopsis

The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought presents an authoritative, coherent and wide-ranging guide to the afterlife of Greco-Roman antiquity in later Western cultures and a ground-breaking reinterpretation of large aspects of Western culture as a whole from a classical perspective. * Features a unique combination of chronological range, cultural scope, coherent argument, and unified analysis * Written in a lively, engaging, and elegant manner * Presents an innovative overview of the afterlife of antiquity * Crosses disciplinary boundaries to make new sense of a rich variety of material, rarely brought together * Fully illustrated with a mix of color and black & white images

About this title

Review:

"It conducts, to its great benefit and ours, a properly theoretical enquiry....The book's structure and contents are highly innovative, with short, packed chapters, in the main driven by ideas not data, jointly written throughout by the three authors with their complementary expertise (so giving an intellectual consistency that a multi-authored volume necessarily lacks)... It belongs in the library of anyone who seriously cares about Western culture." (Translation and Literature, 2015)

"The authors are able to write a most readable book that has the merit to summarize the topic of the afterlife of antiquity with a variety not common in other books on the same subject. The emphasis on architecture, and not only on visual arts, and the references to political and aesthetic thought are most welcome." (Enthymema, 28 November 2014)

From the Back Cover:

The classical tradition--the legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome--is a large, diverse and important field that continues to shape human endeavour and engender wide public interest. The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought presents an original, coherent and wide-ranging guide to the afterlife of Greco-Roman antiquity in later Western cultures and a ground-breaking reinterpretation of large aspects of Western culture as a whole - English-speaking, French, German and Italian - from a classical perspective. Encompassing almost two millennia of developments in art, literature, and thought, the authors provide an overview of the field, a concise point of reference, and a critical review of selected examples, from Titian to T. S. Eliot, from the hero to concepts of government. They engage in current theoretical debate on various fronts, from hermeneutics to gender.

Themes explored include the Western languages and their continuing engagement with Latin and Greek; the role of translation; the intricate relationship of pagan and Christian; the ideological implications of the classical tradition; the interplay between the classical tradition and the histories of scholarship and education; the relation between high and low culture; and the myriad complex relationships--comparative, contrastive, and interactive--between art, literature, and thought themselves. Authoritative and accessible, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought offers new insights into the powerful legacy of the ancient world from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present day.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1405155493
• ISBN 13: 9781405155496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 536