Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine - Hardcover

Armstrong, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199236682 ISBN 13: 9780199236688

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2019

Synopsis

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 volume 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.

Divided into two parts, the first explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil's plants, from awe-inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, and shows 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 of the book, the focus shifts towards 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, Vergil's Green Thoughts appositely reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora.

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca Armstrong, Mary Bennett Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford

Rebecca Armstrong is Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford, and Mary Bennett Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Hilda's College. She grew up in rural north Devon before coming to Oxford to study, and took up her current posts in 2004. She now lives in rural north Oxfordshire.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0199236682
• ISBN 13: 9780199236688
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 342