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Walking Through Elysium
Vergil's Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition

Bill Gladhill (Edited by), Micah Y. Myers (Edited by)

9781487505776

Hardback, published 6 April 2020

320 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.4 cm, 0.64 kg

"Walking through Elysium deserves the attention of anyone interested in the splendor of Vergil’s achievement in what some consider to be his finest product…The editors and their colleagues have succeeded in continuing the endless and enthralling walk of explicating Aeneid 6 with admirable vigor and welcome lucidity."

- Lee Fratantuono, Maynooth University (CJ-Online)

Walking through Elysium stresses the subtle and intricate ways writers across time and space wove Vergil’s underworld in Aeneid 6 into their works. These allusions operate on many levels, from the literary and political to the religious and spiritual. Aeneid 6 reshaped prior philosophical, religious, and poetic traditions of underworld descents, while offering a universalizing account of the spiritual that could accommodate prior as well as emerging religious and philosophical systems. Vergil’s underworld became an archetype, a model flexible enough to be employed across genres, and periods, and among differing cultural and religious contexts.

The essays in this volume speak to Vergil’s incorporation of and influence on literary representations of underworlds, souls, afterlives, prophecies, journeys, and spaces, from sacred and profane to wild and civilized, tracing the impact of Vergil’s underworld on authors such as Ovid, Seneca, Statius, Augustine, and Shelley, from Pagan and Christian traditions through Romantic and Spiritualist readings. Walking through Elysium asserts the deep and lasting influence of Vergil’s underworld from the moment of its publication to the present day.

Introduction: Bill Gladhill, McGill University, and Micah Myers, Kenyon College

1. Into the Woods       
Alessandro Barchiesi, New York University

2. Statius’ Walking in Vergil’s Footsteps     
Emily Pillinger, King’s College London

3. The Sibyl’s Cave and Visions of the Future   
Maggie Kilgour, McGill University

4. Exploring the Forests of Antiquity: The Golden Bough in Early Modern Literature    
Matteo Soranzo, McGill University

5. Aeneas’ Steps       
Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

6. Vergil’s Underworld and the Afterlife of Love Poets   
Micah Y. Myers, Kenyon College

7. Vergilian Underworlds in Ovid      
Alison Keith, University of Toronto

8. Mortem aliquid ultra est: Vergil’s Underworld in Senecan Tragedy    
Bill Gladhill, McGill University

9. Servius on Sinners and Punishments in Vergil’s Underworld 
Fabio Stok, University of Rome Tor Vergata

10. Paradise and Performance in Vergil’s Underworld and Horace’s Carmen Saeculare
Lauren Curtis, Bard College

11. Why isn’t Homer in Virgil’s Underworld? – and Other Notable Absences      
Emily Gowers, University of Cambridge

12. The Silence of Aeneid 6 in Augustine’s Confessions 
Jacob L. Mackey, Occidental College

13. Spiritualism as Textual Practice    
Grant Parker, Stanford University

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