Palgrave Macmillan US

Palgrave Macmillan US

English

"Caldwell's Virgil Made English is a first-rate study that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the decline of the classics in eighteenth-century literature. Well-researched and well-argued, it is as provocative as it is rigorous." - Robert Markley, Romano Professorial Scholar, Department of English, Unit for Criticism and Theory, University of Illinois "This is a superb account of Virgil s declining authority from post-Reformation England to colonial America. Sifting through a commanding knowledge of the many editions, translations, miscellanies, parodies of, and keys to Virgil, Caldwell masterfully demonstrates how modern literary activity emerged from the tension between the inherited habit of drawing on Virgil and the increasing need to supplant his outmoded heroic tradition with a new concern for the novel and the domestic. Caldwell s sharply defined dialectic between the receding claims of Virgilian authority and the increasingly clamorous imperatives of contemporary history make Virgil Made English a key sourcebook for all studies of Restoration and eighteenth-century literary culture." - Anna Battigelli, Professor of English, SUNY Plattsburgh