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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... desire for a solution. On taking inconsistencies in the Aeneid seriously as an integral part of the text, rather than explaining them away, see O'Hara 2005 (describing his forthcoming book, with a summary of this direction in Virgil ...
... desire (what Virgil's Latin regularly expresses by amor or cupido). We begin this theme in chapter 1 with Virgil's most elaborate—and on close inspection most peculiar—descriptions of slain warriors: passages in Books 9–11 wherein he ...
... desire becomes a contested metaphor for the Roman imperialism with which Anchises inculcates Aeneas. The synthetic Trojan-Italian nation of Anchises' prophecy remains unstable on its own terms: Roman identity is still radically ...
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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 |