Modern Europe and Classical Connections

Abstract

Part I explores Britain’s and France’s connections to the Greco-Roman world, with an emphasis on nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary texts. It does not offer an exhaustive comparative historical, cultural and political study. It mainly consists of tracing some of the ways in which classical cultures were reinvested, re-imagined and appropriated by British and French intellectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As my emphasis is on the influence of classical conceptions of empire and race on modern imperialist discourses, I am concerned, above all, with mapping the ideological and cultural ‘contact zone’ between the Greco-Roman thought and modern colonial cultures. The aim is to pin down and analyse within a postcolonial perspective key Greco-Roman concepts and ideas that gained currency in the modern colonial era.