Virgil's Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the AeneidVirgil's Aeneid invites its reader to identify with the Roman nation whose origins and destiny it celebrates. But, as J. D. Reed argues in Virgil's Gaze, the great Roman epic satisfies this identification only indirectly--if at all. In retelling the story of Aeneas' foundational journey from Troy to Italy, Virgil defines Roman national identity only provisionally, through oppositions to other ethnic identities--especially Trojan, Carthaginian, Italian, and Greek--oppositions that shift with the shifting perspective of the narrative. Roman identity emerges as multivalent and constantly changing rather than unitary and stable. The Roman self that the poem gives us is capacious--adaptable to a universal nationality, potentially an imperial force--but empty at its heart. However, the incongruities that produce this emptiness are also what make the Aeneid endlessly readable, since they forestall a single perspective and a single notion of the Roman. |
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... left blank PREFACE This book studies the. CONTENTS PREFACE Introduction ONE • Euryalus TWO • Turnus THREE • Dido FOUR • Andromache FIVE • Ancient Cities SIX • Marcellus SEVEN • Aeneas BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX OF TEXTS CITED GENERAL INDEX ...
... Dido and the female and Italian Camilla, but also in unexpected ways. The poem's evaluation of the national claims of Turnus 1 See Hannah 2004. must be viewed alongside his assimilation, at crucial moments in Introduction.
... Dido, explore the repercussions of the death images in the treatment of those two obstacles to Aeneas' divinely appointed mission. Thematically, Turnus and Dido too have to do with youth, death, and desire, and the figure of the dying ...
... Dido and Andromache) and tries to establish the different lines that the poem draws between the self and an Other and to show how those lines are constantly being erased and redrawn. These three chapters are much concerned with Virgil's ...
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Contents
1 | |
Euryalus | 16 |
Turnus | 44 |
Dido | 73 |
Andromache | 101 |
Ancient Cities | 129 |
Marcellus | 148 |
Aeneas | 173 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 203 |
INDEX OF TEXTS CITED | 211 |
GENERAL INDEX | 223 |