The Decline and Fall of Virgil in Eighteenth-Century Germany. The Repressed Muse. / Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, & Culture.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - A very good and clean copy. - At the beginning of the eighteenth century Virgil enjoyed a position of unparalled authority in the literary culture of Germany as well as Europe more generally. Virgil�s preeminence in the highest of the recognized genres of poetic composition, the epic, was unquestioned, and in the popular and luxuriant pastoral, his language, his motifs, and his image of Arcadia (his own innovation) pervaded the artistic consciousness of the age. Yet by the century�s close Virgil had been not merely dethroned but also degraded as the poet who had failed to compose anything that could creditably be called a poem. This fall from grace was not confined to Virgil alone but extended to the assessment of the entire Roman literary achievement: Virgil became the failed poet, and Latin literature the failed national literature. To explain this shift requires an examination of its relation to the wider concerns of the German Enlightenment and the contemporaneous rise of German philhellenism. The primary aim of this book is to explain this repudiation of Virgil and the Latins in Germany during the eighteenth century and the understanding of antiquity it bequeathed to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book�s other objective is to show that, despite Virgil�s official dethronement and dismemberment, German writers of the period in epic and pastoral literature continued to harken to the Virgilian muse, although they were increasingly disinclined to acknowledge it after the century�s midpoint. ISBN 9781571133069