Constructing the classical past : the role of landscape in Christopher Wordsworth's Greece
Abstract
This article examines the works of Christopher Wordsworth (1807-85), who has hitherto been neglected as an important and intriguing figure in the history of travel writing on Greece. His texts, which invite readers to 'view' the country from mountain-tops and to imagine its caves and quarries filled with ancient figures, highlight the importance of landscape as a frame for studying classical reception. Wordsworth 'received' ancient Greece through its visible, modern landscape in three ways: Through a sense of the landscape as a container for memory, through the use of specific landscapes as springboard for 'flights of fancy' enabling a vivid engagement with the classical past, and as a tool for better interpreting and understanding the history and literature of the ancient Mediterranean. Christopher Wordsworth constructed a vision of ancient Greece for his readers through his description of the nineteenth-century landscape. As such he offers an important reminder to consider the role played by the embodied experience of space and place in analysing acts of classical reception.
Citation
Hollis , D L 2022 , ' Constructing the classical past : the role of landscape in Christopher Wordsworth's Greece ' , Classical Receptions Journal , vol. 14 , no. 2 , pp. 159-177 . https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clab015
Publication
Classical Receptions Journal
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1759-5134Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
Description
Funding: This article is the result of research conducted as part of a Leverhulme Trust Project on ‘mountains in ancient literature and culture and their postclassical reception’ with grant number (RPG-2016-395).Collections
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