Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art

During the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British imagination was captivated by images of ascent and flight to the heavens, explored in Celestial Aspirations. This fascination manifested in literature, art, and philosophy, with works such as Paradise Lost and the Whig sublime. The book examines the motivations for aspiring to the heavens, whether for political or intellectual achievement or personal spiritual exertion.

Format: Hardback
Length: 400 pages
Publication date: 01 March 2022
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination, encompassing poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual, and religious realms, exhibited a profound fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations delves into how British literature and art during this period capitalized on classical representations of these soaring themes, employing philosophical, scientific, and poetic explorations of the mind, the ascension of the disembodied soul, and the celestial glorification of rulers. From the textual aspirations for the heavens in the works of Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Cowley to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio, and Thornhill, Philip Hardie examines the ways in which the history, ideologies, and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent reach their grandest proportions in Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic centered around a Christian narrative of falling and rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Hardie explores the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, considering the Whig sublime as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he examines motivations for aspiring to the heavens, ranging from political and military achievements to individual intellectual and spiritual endeavors.

Celestial Aspirations provides an insightful exploration of how creative minds reinterpreted ancient notions of time and space in the early modern era.

Weight: 806g
Dimension: 166 x 245 x 34 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691197869