Sites Of Rome, The: Time, Space, Memory

Description: 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 by contemporary 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. Table of Contents: Introduction: Roma, recepta: a topography of the imagination; 1. Rome at a gallop: Livy, on not gazing, jumping, or toppling into the void; 2. 'In the name of the father': Ovid's Theban law; 3. 'I get around': sadism, desire, and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal; 4. Holes in the body: sites of abjection in Juvenal's Rome; 5. Victim and voyeur: Rome as a character in Tacitus' Histories 3; 6. The gates of Janus: Bakhtin and Plutarch's Roman meta-chronotope; 7. Staging Rome: the renaissance, Rome, and humanism's classical crisis; 8. Sizing up Rome, or theorizing the overview; 9. Ancient Rome for little comrades: the legacy of classical antiquity in Soviet children's literature; 10. The sites and sights of Rome in Fellini's films: 'not a human habitation but a psychical entity'