Cornelia D. J. Pearsall
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195150544
- eISBN:
- 9780199871124
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195150544.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book explores Tennyson’s representation of rapture, or being carried away, as a radical mechanism of transformation—theological, social, political, or personal—and as a figure for critical ...
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This book explores Tennyson’s representation of rapture, or being carried away, as a radical mechanism of transformation—theological, social, political, or personal—and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet’s fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Situating Tennyson within communities of Victorian classicists, explorers, politicians, theologians, and sexologists, this book offers substantial original readings of a range of Tennyson’s major poems. Tennyson’s Rapture investigates the poet’s previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism (with its belief in the oncoming rapture), and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson’ work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals, a pattern illuminated by the poet’s intellectual and emotional investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, in particular the contested discovery of Homer’s raptured Troy. Tennyson’s attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, informed by the political and philosophical writings of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam (the subject of In Memoriam) and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson’s long career. Proposing a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech, demonstrating instead the commanding cultural ambitions of dramatic speakers and the poet himself.Less
This book explores Tennyson’s representation of rapture, or being carried away, as a radical mechanism of transformation—theological, social, political, or personal—and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet’s fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Situating Tennyson within communities of Victorian classicists, explorers, politicians, theologians, and sexologists, this book offers substantial original readings of a range of Tennyson’s major poems. Tennyson’s Rapture investigates the poet’s previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism (with its belief in the oncoming rapture), and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson’ work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals, a pattern illuminated by the poet’s intellectual and emotional investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, in particular the contested discovery of Homer’s raptured Troy. Tennyson’s attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, informed by the political and philosophical writings of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam (the subject of In Memoriam) and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson’s long career. Proposing a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech, demonstrating instead the commanding cultural ambitions of dramatic speakers and the poet himself.
Andrew Smith and Anna Barton
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784995102
- eISBN:
- 9781526128287
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995102.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The Introduction outlines two areas. First, it provides an overview of how the field of Victorian studies has developed in a global context over the past fifty years. This includes outlining the ...
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The Introduction outlines two areas. First, it provides an overview of how the field of Victorian studies has developed in a global context over the past fifty years. This includes outlining the various academic associations and their national contexts as well as the development of journal publishing outlets and websites dedicated to the period. Secondly, it provides an overview of the key discussions which have taken place in nineteenth century studies and indicates how the book seeks to develop these lines of enquiry. It also indicates how the series of which the volume is a part will also seek to commission original research into the period. It also outlines the chapters which compose the book.Less
The Introduction outlines two areas. First, it provides an overview of how the field of Victorian studies has developed in a global context over the past fifty years. This includes outlining the various academic associations and their national contexts as well as the development of journal publishing outlets and websites dedicated to the period. Secondly, it provides an overview of the key discussions which have taken place in nineteenth century studies and indicates how the book seeks to develop these lines of enquiry. It also indicates how the series of which the volume is a part will also seek to commission original research into the period. It also outlines the chapters which compose the book.
Jo Briggs
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089640
- eISBN:
- 9781526109590
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089640.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This section introduces the themes of the book using the satirical play, Novelty Fair, as a starting point. It explores methodologies for studying the interaction between high and low culture – a ...
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This section introduces the themes of the book using the satirical play, Novelty Fair, as a starting point. It explores methodologies for studying the interaction between high and low culture – a particularly pertinent problem in relation to the mid 19th century due to the divided approaches to these years in the existing scholarship. Typically Marxism, class and the history of working-class movements has been the framework employed in relation to 1848, while post-modernism, consumerism and bourgeois consolidation dominate in relation to 1851. This introduction begins to reconsider these divides, suggesting that the examination of previously neglected sources can offer a new perspective on this pivotal period in British history. The introduction ends with an overview of the chapters that follow.Less
This section introduces the themes of the book using the satirical play, Novelty Fair, as a starting point. It explores methodologies for studying the interaction between high and low culture – a particularly pertinent problem in relation to the mid 19th century due to the divided approaches to these years in the existing scholarship. Typically Marxism, class and the history of working-class movements has been the framework employed in relation to 1848, while post-modernism, consumerism and bourgeois consolidation dominate in relation to 1851. This introduction begins to reconsider these divides, suggesting that the examination of previously neglected sources can offer a new perspective on this pivotal period in British history. The introduction ends with an overview of the chapters that follow.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this ...
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The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.Less
The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.
Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474435734
- eISBN:
- 9781474453721
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474435734.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the ...
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Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.Less
Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.
Kathleen Frederickson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262519
- eISBN:
- 9780823266395
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had ...
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It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The book argues that this paradox emerges as a result (and a cause) of changes to how instinct operates as a mechanism for governmentality as it helps gloss over contradictions in British liberalism that had been made palpable as writers around the turn of the twentieth century grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. As a result of these changes, instinct takes on new appeal to elite European men who identify instinct as both an agent of civilizational “progress” and a force that offers (in contradistinction to the lack associated with desire) a plenitude that can hold the alienation of self-consciousness at bay. Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers and/or savages, this shift in instinct’s appeal to civilized European men nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book makes this argument by examining materials such as legal and parliamentary papers about the regulation of obscenity, pornographic fiction, ethnological monographs about Aboriginal Australians, treatises on political economy, and suffragette memoirs alongside scientific texts in evolutionary theory, psychology, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.Less
It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The book argues that this paradox emerges as a result (and a cause) of changes to how instinct operates as a mechanism for governmentality as it helps gloss over contradictions in British liberalism that had been made palpable as writers around the turn of the twentieth century grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. As a result of these changes, instinct takes on new appeal to elite European men who identify instinct as both an agent of civilizational “progress” and a force that offers (in contradistinction to the lack associated with desire) a plenitude that can hold the alienation of self-consciousness at bay. Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers and/or savages, this shift in instinct’s appeal to civilized European men nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book makes this argument by examining materials such as legal and parliamentary papers about the regulation of obscenity, pornographic fiction, ethnological monographs about Aboriginal Australians, treatises on political economy, and suffragette memoirs alongside scientific texts in evolutionary theory, psychology, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.
Tricia Lootens
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691170312
- eISBN:
- 9781400883721
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691170312.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter offers a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem “A Curse for a Nation”—a response to the proslavery, imperialist national sentimentality of the American “Ostend Manifesto” of ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem “A Curse for a Nation”—a response to the proslavery, imperialist national sentimentality of the American “Ostend Manifesto” of 1854—and examines how it may intersect with the meanings of mid-century British antislavery poetics within our own time. “Curse” is set into circulation through and beyond the boundaries not only of Britain, the United States, and Italy, but also of the so-called “Abolition time.” Before showing how reading “Curse” brings us to the realm of “Abolition time,” the chapter considers Second Wave Poetess criticism on the poem and how reflections on “changing the subject” might help illuminate its cultural life within its own time—or times. It argues that “Curse,” once confronted as an act of conflicted, racialized ethical refocalization, might (re)emerge, in our own time, as a convergence point for Victorian studies, feminist theory, historical poetics, and critical race studies.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem “A Curse for a Nation”—a response to the proslavery, imperialist national sentimentality of the American “Ostend Manifesto” of 1854—and examines how it may intersect with the meanings of mid-century British antislavery poetics within our own time. “Curse” is set into circulation through and beyond the boundaries not only of Britain, the United States, and Italy, but also of the so-called “Abolition time.” Before showing how reading “Curse” brings us to the realm of “Abolition time,” the chapter considers Second Wave Poetess criticism on the poem and how reflections on “changing the subject” might help illuminate its cultural life within its own time—or times. It argues that “Curse,” once confronted as an act of conflicted, racialized ethical refocalization, might (re)emerge, in our own time, as a convergence point for Victorian studies, feminist theory, historical poetics, and critical race studies.
Jude Piesse
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198752967
- eISBN:
- 9780191814433
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198752967.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, American, 19th Century Literature
The conclusion restates the book’s thesis about the Victorian periodical’s capacity to register and mediate settler emigration and reviews its wider implications. It argues that the significant ...
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The conclusion restates the book’s thesis about the Victorian periodical’s capacity to register and mediate settler emigration and reviews its wider implications. It argues that the significant differences between settler emigration texts and the adventure literature of high imperialism should cause scholars to redraw the cultural map of Victorian empire as a whole. Furthermore, it proposes that intersections between British periodical emigration texts and a broader field of Anglo settler literature require us to factor new elements of transnational and global circulation into our understanding of Australian, New Zealand, American, Canadian, and British literatures. The conclusion also contends that periodical settler emigration literature informed a diverse constellation of Victorian cultural and ideological formations, beyond those specifically concerned with empire and global relations. These include concepts of national identity, the formation of feminist and radical imaginaries, and the thematic range and affective qualities of Victorian novels.Less
The conclusion restates the book’s thesis about the Victorian periodical’s capacity to register and mediate settler emigration and reviews its wider implications. It argues that the significant differences between settler emigration texts and the adventure literature of high imperialism should cause scholars to redraw the cultural map of Victorian empire as a whole. Furthermore, it proposes that intersections between British periodical emigration texts and a broader field of Anglo settler literature require us to factor new elements of transnational and global circulation into our understanding of Australian, New Zealand, American, Canadian, and British literatures. The conclusion also contends that periodical settler emigration literature informed a diverse constellation of Victorian cultural and ideological formations, beyond those specifically concerned with empire and global relations. These include concepts of national identity, the formation of feminist and radical imaginaries, and the thematic range and affective qualities of Victorian novels.
Kate Nichols
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199596461
- eISBN:
- 9780191795770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596461.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
The introduction situates this book in the broader fields of classical reception studies, cultural history, art history, museum studies, and Victorian studies. It sets out methodological approaches ...
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The introduction situates this book in the broader fields of classical reception studies, cultural history, art history, museum studies, and Victorian studies. It sets out methodological approaches to nineteenth-century understandings of the past and historical consciousness. It provides an overview of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, its directors’ ideals, guidebooks, displays, history, and protagonists. It offers a tour of the classical sculpture on display in the Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts.Less
The introduction situates this book in the broader fields of classical reception studies, cultural history, art history, museum studies, and Victorian studies. It sets out methodological approaches to nineteenth-century understandings of the past and historical consciousness. It provides an overview of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, its directors’ ideals, guidebooks, displays, history, and protagonists. It offers a tour of the classical sculpture on display in the Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts.
Gideon Nisbet
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199662494
- eISBN:
- 9780191761355
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662494.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book develops a case study of a single ancient Greek verse genre, epigram, in its modern reception from 1805 to 1929. Previously exclusive to an educated elite for whom it served time-honoured ...
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This book develops a case study of a single ancient Greek verse genre, epigram, in its modern reception from 1805 to 1929. Previously exclusive to an educated elite for whom it served time-honoured functions in pedagogy and social exchange, epigram in the nineteenth century became an important site of contestation between mainstream and dissident Hellenisms in the public sphere. Its principal literary repository, the Greek Anthology, was hailed as a unique social document which gave unmediated access to ancient private lives. Picking and choosing from its thousands of poems let translators and literary historians string together any story they wanted about the Greek ‘Genius’, the national and racial spirit which was widely felt to live again through modern British character and achievement; so these stories were potentially about ‘us’, or about who ‘we’ might become in future. One book of the Anthology, however, stuck out as alien: the twelfth, dedicated to the love of men for handsome youths. Subcultural appropriations of the Anthology thus became an important tool in forging an honourable genealogy for male homosexual desire. In turn, these appropriations provoked a backlash by conservative critics, the after-effects of whose rhetoric of containment is still with us in epigram studies today. By tracking this one ‘minor’ genre through a century and more of (mis)representation, Greek Epigram in Reception therefore throws new light on the complex processes by which ancient literary works are received in translation, selection, and exegesis, and on how these processes forever change the texts on which they operate.Less
This book develops a case study of a single ancient Greek verse genre, epigram, in its modern reception from 1805 to 1929. Previously exclusive to an educated elite for whom it served time-honoured functions in pedagogy and social exchange, epigram in the nineteenth century became an important site of contestation between mainstream and dissident Hellenisms in the public sphere. Its principal literary repository, the Greek Anthology, was hailed as a unique social document which gave unmediated access to ancient private lives. Picking and choosing from its thousands of poems let translators and literary historians string together any story they wanted about the Greek ‘Genius’, the national and racial spirit which was widely felt to live again through modern British character and achievement; so these stories were potentially about ‘us’, or about who ‘we’ might become in future. One book of the Anthology, however, stuck out as alien: the twelfth, dedicated to the love of men for handsome youths. Subcultural appropriations of the Anthology thus became an important tool in forging an honourable genealogy for male homosexual desire. In turn, these appropriations provoked a backlash by conservative critics, the after-effects of whose rhetoric of containment is still with us in epigram studies today. By tracking this one ‘minor’ genre through a century and more of (mis)representation, Greek Epigram in Reception therefore throws new light on the complex processes by which ancient literary works are received in translation, selection, and exegesis, and on how these processes forever change the texts on which they operate.
Christopher Stray, Michael Clarke, and Joshua T. Katz (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198810803
- eISBN:
- 9780191847912
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198810803.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott is one of the most famous dictionaries in the world, and for the past century-and-a-half has been a constant and indispensable presence in teaching, ...
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The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott is one of the most famous dictionaries in the world, and for the past century-and-a-half has been a constant and indispensable presence in teaching, learning, and research on ancient Greek throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Despite continuous modification and updating, it is still recognizably a Victorian creation; at the same time, however, it carries undiminished authority both for its account of the Greek language and for its system of organizing and presenting linguistic data. This book includes chapters on all aspects of the history, constitution, and problematics of this extraordinary work, examining its complex history and appreciating it as a monument to the challenges and pitfalls of classical scholarship. The chapters combine a variety of approaches and methodologies—historical, philological, theoretical—in order to situate the book within the various disciplines to which it is relevant; from semantics, lexicography, and historical linguistics to literary theory, Victorian studies, and the history of the book. Paying tribute to the Lexicon’s enormous effect on the evolving theory and practice of lexicography, it also includes a section looking forward to new developments in dictionary-making in the digital age, bringing comprehensively up to date the question of what the future holds for this fascinating and perplexing monument to the challenges of understanding an ancient language.Less
The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott is one of the most famous dictionaries in the world, and for the past century-and-a-half has been a constant and indispensable presence in teaching, learning, and research on ancient Greek throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Despite continuous modification and updating, it is still recognizably a Victorian creation; at the same time, however, it carries undiminished authority both for its account of the Greek language and for its system of organizing and presenting linguistic data. This book includes chapters on all aspects of the history, constitution, and problematics of this extraordinary work, examining its complex history and appreciating it as a monument to the challenges and pitfalls of classical scholarship. The chapters combine a variety of approaches and methodologies—historical, philological, theoretical—in order to situate the book within the various disciplines to which it is relevant; from semantics, lexicography, and historical linguistics to literary theory, Victorian studies, and the history of the book. Paying tribute to the Lexicon’s enormous effect on the evolving theory and practice of lexicography, it also includes a section looking forward to new developments in dictionary-making in the digital age, bringing comprehensively up to date the question of what the future holds for this fascinating and perplexing monument to the challenges of understanding an ancient language.