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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... poem's constructions of nationality, perhaps most conspicuously in the case of the female and Phoenician Dido and the female and Italian Camilla, but also in unexpected ways. The poem's evaluation of the national claims of Turnus 1 See ...
... poem: Roman identity is an ambiguous figure, a problêma without a single solution. The polycentrism that many have ... poem's provisionality as less ambivalent than multivalent, and as serving a capacious imperialism consistent with ...
... poem's latter-day Italian kings). But Saturn and his subjects have no direct relation to the later inhabitants apart ... poem and the smaller genealogies and stories of origin, inserted with the passing mention of a name like that of ...
... poem's persons we have the symbolic ethnic identifications produced by extra-textual allusions of various kinds ... poem, etiologizes the dominion of the Romans over Campania in central Italy (specifically through the city that served as ...
... poem's implied self and the nations of the eastern Mediterranean (“barbarian” nations, according to the Hellenocentric discourse that Romans adopted for certain purposes—but potentially, as seen from the west, including the Greeks). We ...
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 |