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. |
From inside the book
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... take into account more than a part of the immense and ever-increasing critical literature; I am no exception, and I can only hope that my references make my debts plain and ultimately permit readers to make up my inadvertent omissions ...
... takes—necessary but complicated. Virgil's poem, in fact, represents (among other things) a Roman version of a ... take account of these as well. Sometimes characters (particularly those who oppose Aeneas' Trojans) equate Eastern ...
... take into account that this is the first colloquy between the Aeneadae and Italian natives. 24 The opposite is the case with Carthage, where the similarity is what threatens to undermine the poem's insistence on Roman power and ...
... takes on its composition. The last chapter concentrates on the role of Aeneas as a viewer and a medium for our viewpoint on these topics, and on the contradictions in his viewership that parallel the shifts in perspective we have been ...
... take a few large-scale examples). Comparisons bridge boundaries of text and reality, of myth and politics, and between texts. The poem gives us a standpoint that binds and unbinds, creates likenesses and unlikenesses, and it invites us ...
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 |