Vergil's green thoughts : plants, humans, and the divine /
The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This work joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil's...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
2019.
|
| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This work joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil's plants and trees to reveal how fundamental they are to an understanding of the poet's outlook on religion, culture, and mankind's place within the world. The first half of the book explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil's plants, from awe–inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, showing how both cultivated and uncultivated plants fit within and help to shape the complex landscape of Vergilian (and, more broadly, Roman) religious thought. In the second half, the focus moves to human interactions with plants from the perspectives of both cultivation and relaxation, exploring the love–hate relationship with vegetation which sometimes supports and sometimes contests the human self-image as the world's dominant species. Combining a series of close readings of a wide range of passages with the identification of broader patterns of association, this book reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (ix, 330 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-317) and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780192524201 0192524208 9780191746833 0191746835 |