Introduction: The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth- Century

Abstract

As Caroline Winterer argues in her insightful study of Greco-Roman culture in American intellectual life, “next to Christianity, the central intellectual project in America before the late nineteenth-century was classicism” (Winterer, 2002, 1). This permeation of ancient models in a new nation seeking to break from the yoke of European culture presents some paradoxes which have been pointed out by historian Meyer Reinhold: Despite the distance from the great centers of humanistic learning, t...