The essays collected in this volume examine manifestations of our sublime cosmos in ancient literature and its reception. Individual themes include religious mystery; calendrical and cyclical thinking as ordering principles of human experience; divine birth and the manifold nature of divinity (both awesome and terrifying); contemplation of the sky and meteorological (ir)regularity; fears associated with overpowering natural and anthropogenic events; and the aspirations and limitations of human expression. In texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the volume’s chapters apply diverse critical methods and approaches that engage with sublimity in various aesthetic, agential and metaphysical aspects. The ancient texts – epic, dramatic, historiographic and lyric – treated here are rooted in a remote world where, within a framework of (perceived) celestial order, literature, myth and science still communicated profoundly, a tradition that continued in literary receptions of these ancient works.
This volume honours the intellectual legacy of Thomas D. Worthen, a scholar whose expertise and insights cut across multiple disciplines, and who influenced and inspired students and colleagues at the University of Arizona, USA, for over three decades. Beyond clarifying temporally and culturally distant contemplations of the human universe, these essays aim to inform the continuing sense of wonder and horror at the sublime heights and depths of our ever-changing cosmos.
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction, David Christenson (University of Arizona, USA)
Part I – Sublime Epic
1. Homer’s Odyssey and the Mystery of Time, Norman Austin (University of Arizona, USA)
2. Helen, Paris, and the Philosophical Eros: Love, Strife, and Sublime Contact from Homer to Plato, Boris Shoshitaishvili (University of Southern California, USA)
3. The Hard-Break at Hesiod, Theogony 200, Frank Romer (East Carolina University, USA)
4. Visions and Memories of Lucretius in Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones, Christopher Trinacty (Oberlin College and Conservatory, USA)
5. Vergil’s Bougonia Rite: Its Nature, Sources, and Possible Link to the Indo-European Myth of Creation, Michael Teske† (University of Arizona, USA)
Part II – Celestial Drama
6. An Early Morning Person? Aristophanes and His Star-Studded Comic Prologues, Gonda van Steen (King's College London, UK)
7. Frighteningly Funny Gods: Comic and Cosmic Space in Plautus, David Christenson (University of Arizona, USA)
Part III – History, Historiography, and the Cosmos
8. Day Suddenly Became Night: Eclipses and the Sublime in Greek Historiography, Philip Waddell (University of Arizona, USA)
9. The Cosmic Barrier: The Isthmus of Corinth in Imperial Latin Poetry, David Wright (University of Houston, USA)
Part IV – Reception
10. Reading the Classics in Plague-Ridden England, 1629-1722, Thomas Willard (University of Arizona, USA)
11. '"Solution Sweet" and Keats's Poetic Ideal: Erotic and Nuptial Imagery in The Eve of St. Agnes' , Cynthia White (University of Arizona, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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