Overview

This is a book about two empiresDLAmerica and RomeDLand the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US stateDLboth to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empireDLrepublicanism and slaveryDLto the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have readDLand how we might yet read.

Full Product Details

9780198871507

Table of Contents

Reviews

The book takes in a wide scope...Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study... -- Roma Redux, New Books Network

The book takes in a wide scope...Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study... * Roma Redux, New Books Network *

Time and Antiquity in American Empire is a fascinating inquiry into the multiple - and often unexpected - ways in which Roman analogies are germane to US imperial discourse. It is undoubtedly a major intervention in the political history of classical models, and it makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of transatlantic historical time. * Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Transatlantica * Time and Antiquity in American Empire is a fascinating inquiry into the multiple-and often unexpected-ways in which Roman analogies are germane to US imperial discourse. It is undoubtedly a major intervention in the political history of classical models, and it makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of transatlantic historical time. * Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Transatlantica * Time and Antiquity in American Empire asks us to reimagine the ways we might undertake comparative literature, by, as Walter Benjamin invokes, 'grasp[ing] the constellation which [our] own era has formed with a definite earlier one' in an analogical network of dynamic, overlapping and ever-unfurling significance. * Andrew Taylor, The Review of English Studies *

Author Information

Mark Storey is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has published essays on American literature in numerous journals and collections, including Nineteenth-Century Literature, Modernism/modernity, and Neither the Time Nor the Place: Today's Nineteenth Century (Ed. Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman, Uni versityof Pennsylvania Press, 2021). He is also, with Stephen Shapiro, co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Horror.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available