The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory

Front Cover
David H. J. Larmour, Diana Spencer
OUP Oxford, 2007 - Architecture - 436 pages
Rome was a building site for much of its history, a city continually reshaped and reconstituted in line with political and cultural change. In later times, the conjunction of ruins and rebuilding lent the cityscape a particularly fascinating character, much exploited by artists and writers. This layering and changing of vistas also finds expression in the literary tradition, from classical times right up to the twenty-first-century. This collection of essays offers glimpses,sideways glances and unexpected angles that open up Rome in its widest possible sense, and explores how the visible components of Rome - the hills, the Tiber, the temples, the Forums, the Colosseum, the statues and monuments - operate as, or become, the sites/sights of Rome.The analyses are informed bycontemporary critical thinking and draw on ancient historical narrative, Roman poetry, Renaissance literature and cartography, art of the Grand Tour era, Russian and Soviet interpretations, and twentieth-century cinema.
 

Contents

a topography of the imagination
1
Livy on not gazing jumping or toppling into the void
61
Ovids Theban law
102
sadism desire and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace Ovid and Juvenal
138
sites of abjection in Juvenals Rome
168
Rome as a character in Tacitus Histories 3
211
Bakhtin and Plutarchs Roman metachronotope
238
the Renaissance Rome and humanisms classical crisis
271
8 Sizing up Rome or theorizing the overview
295
the legacy of classical antiquity in Soviet childrens literature
323
not a human habitation but a psychical entity
353
Bibliography
385
General Index
419
Index of Passages Discussed
431
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