Book Chapters, Encyclopedic Articles, Booklets by Paul A. Roche
Vergil is seminal for any discussion of the political in imperial literature. William Dominik’s c... more Vergil is seminal for any discussion of the political in imperial literature. William Dominik’s chapter on Vergil examines the concept of “geopolitics,” which he refers to generally as constituting the relationship between political and geographical features of the text. Maintaining that “green politics” function as an essential component of the Vergilian narrative, Dominik asserts that political events frequently are treated in terms of the physical world in which they occur. The focus upon the natural environment reveals its vulnerability to the politico-military and urban worlds and the sympathy of the narrator for the environment and its denizens. The conflict that arises in all three poems is attributable to the attempts of man to establish hegemony over the landscape. Through a holistic and intertextual reading of the “book” of Vergil—the Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid—a picture of the natural world emerges in which the “forces of history” and the poet’s sympathetic response to the victims of Rome’s imperial past are emphasized over the “political teleology” of the individual poems.
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Book Chapters, Encyclopedic Articles, Booklets by Paul A. Roche