A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight
preoccupied early modern British writers and artists
Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the
British imagination--poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and
religious--displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and
flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British
literature and art during that period exploited classical
representations of these soaring themes--through philosophical,
scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the
disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler.
From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare,
Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio and
Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the history,
ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and
transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent
appear on the grandest scale in Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic built
around a Christian plot of falling and rising, and one of the most
intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Examining the reception
of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie
considers the Whig sublime, as well as the works of Alexander Pope and
Edward Young. Throughout, he looks at motivations both public and
private for aspiring to the heavens--as a reward for political and
military achievement on the one hand, and as a goal of individual
intellectual and spiritual exertion on the other.
Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing look at how creative minds
reworked ancient visions of time and space in the early modern era.
