Roman Remains: Traces of Classical Rome in Modern British Literature

3 units

This course will examine the use of the Roman textual and material inheritance in poets, novelists and critics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries working in Britain, and will ask how modernity addresses the claims of the classical tradition. We will place Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13 next to Vergil's Aeneid, then survey Hardy's relationship to the visible remainders of Rome and the people it conquered -- roads, barrows, forts -- in the landscape of Dorset. After examining the representation of the Celtic hill-fort in fiction, and the legacy of Vergilian representations of the countryside in poetry, we will consider representations of Rome in light of modern imperialism (Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ezra Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius) and examine the place of Vergil in T. S. Eliot's critical and poetic practice.