Lucan and the Sublime

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Synopsis
This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum Civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex and instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum Civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime.
Copyright:
2013

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9781107020603
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

5 out of 5

By on

This book is ranked high for those interested and capable of contributing to an understanding of the sublime in literature; it is not suitable for those with less lofty goals. It is made less readable by including much properly sourced text in several languages within the text. Although end of chapter notes are used, they do not foreclose the distraction from the text which might be expected and hoped. multiple languages within the main text is especially a problem for screen readers using voice syntthesizers, even with the facility for switching languages automatically. In the case of this book, it is not formatted for automatic language switching. The problem for the blind reader is that text in an unknown foreign language cannot be efficiently skipped. Further, when the language contains unrecognized characters, which was the case for Greek with my reading of this book, each unrecognized character splits every word so that one is left with long stretches of pronounced single letters. Although I read the entire book and found it well done by Bookshare, it is not a book I would recommend, especially to any blind individual. As the subject matter is of interest to me, I will continue to look for a more accessible book.