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Jenny Messenger is an independent scholar, UK. She is a journalist and writer, and she has published numerous articles on social housing, sustainability and the climate crisis.For the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine, ancient texts were not obsolete, but vital handbooks for reading reality. Drawing on Graeco-Roman philosophy alongside modernist receptions of the ancient world, this book is the first study of her engagement with classical antiquity. Raine’s interpretation of the classical past not only informed her literary work, but also gave her a compelling perspective, which located consciousness as the basis of reality. This way of seeing the world, traceable from antiquity to the present day via the ‘perennial philosophy’, claimed little distinction between inner self and outer world, and stressed the interconnectedness of all beings.
Jenny Messenger explores Raine’s use of Graeco-Roman philosophy as source texts for understanding consciousness, articulated throughout her poetry, scholarship and autobiographical writing. Raine believed there were multiple planes of consciousness, across which symbolic poetry and prose could operate to reach the highest levels of being. The creative arts were even capable of shaping consciousness, expanding or shrinking the scope of what could be experienced. Though she won acclaim during her lifetime, her literary reputation has been overshadowed by her relationship with writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell. This book moves the focus back to Raine’s work, bringing her complex classicism to a wider audience.
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1: Raine’s Antiquity
2: Poetry and Plotinian Aesthetics
3: Autobiography and Allegory
4: Other Souls and Altered States
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR: Laura Jansen, Associate Professor in Classics & Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, UK.
Each book in this groundbreaking new series considers the influence of antiquity on a single writer from the twentieth century. From Woolf to Walcott and Fellini to Foucault, the modalities and texture of this modern encounter with antiquity are explored in the works of authors recognized for their global impact on modern fiction, poetry, art, philosophy and socio-politics.
A distinctive feature of twentieth-century writing is the tendency to break with tradition and embrace the new sensibilities of the time. Yet the period continues to maintain a fluid dialogue with the Greco-Roman past, drawing on its rich cultural legacy and thought, even within the most radical movements that ostentatiously questioned and rejected that past. Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing approaches this dialogue from two interrelated perspectives: it asks how modern authors’ appeal to the classical past opens up new readings of their oeuvres and contexts, and it considers how this process in turn renders new insights into the classical world. This two-way perspective offers dynamic and interdisciplinary discussions for readers of Classics and modern literary tradition.
Fellini’s Eternal Rome by Alessandro Carrera received the 2019 Flaiano Prize in the category Italian Studies
Editorial board
Prof. Richard Armstrong (University of Houston)
Prof. Francisco Barrenechea (University of Maryland)
Prof. Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University)
Prof. Paul A. Cartledge (Cambridge University)
Prof. Moira Fradinger (Yale University)
Prof. Francisco García Jurado (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Prof. Barbara Goff (University of Reading)
Prof. Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge)
Dr. Constanze Güthenke (University of Oxford)
Prof. Vassilis Lambropoulos (University of Michigan)
Dr. Pantelis Michelakis (University of Bristol)
Prof. James Porter (University of California, Berkeley)
Prof. Phiroze Vasunia (University College London)
Prof. Patrice Rankine (University of Chicago)
Dr Ella Haselswerdt (University of California, Los Angeles)
Prof. Sean Gurd (The University of Texas at Austin)
Dr Rebecca Kosick (University of Bristol)
Prof. Mario Telò (University of California, Berkeley)