Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean: Writing British Heritage in Ancient Lands (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781009469807)

The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to fully recover and explore the region's centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms 'heritage discourse' - narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity - across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.

Author: Lindsey N. Chappell
ISBN-10: 1009469800
ISBN-13: 9781009469807
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/14/2024
Pages: 322
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.32lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.75d