Troy, Carthage and the Victorians
Subtitle: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9781107192669
Subjects: English literature, history and criticism, 19th century; Trojan war, literature and the war; Troy (extinct city)
Description: Playful, popular visions of Troy and Carthage, backdrops to the Iliad and Aeneid's epic narratives, shine the spotlight on antiquity's starring role in nineteenth-century culture. This is the story of how these ruined cities inspired bold reconstructions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, how archaeological discoveries in the Troad and North Africa sparked dramatic debates, and how their ruins were exploited to conceptualise problematic relationships between past, present and future. Rachel Bryant Davies breaks new ground in the afterlife of classical antiquity by revealing more complex and less constrained interaction with classical knowledge across a broader social spectrum than yet understood, drawing upon methodological developments from disciplines such as history of science and theatre history in order to do so. She also develops a thorough critical framework for understanding classical burlesque and engages in in-depth analysis of a toy-theatre production.