Virgil's Experience: Nature and History, Times, Names, and Places

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Clarendon Press, 1998 - Literary Criticism - 712 pages
This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity, combined with the study of attitudes towards nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century B.C. as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

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About the author (1998)

Richard Jenkyns is at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

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