Constanze Güthenke
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199231850
- eISBN:
- 9780191716188
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231850.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
Moving beyond the conclusion of recent studies that place is symbolic and culturally constructed, this chapter historicizes those insights and traces them back to the central position of nature as ...
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Moving beyond the conclusion of recent studies that place is symbolic and culturally constructed, this chapter historicizes those insights and traces them back to the central position of nature as landscape in post-Kantian and Romantic aesthetics. Here, landscape is thought extraordinarily suitable to embody universal concepts, among them that of freedom in particular. Nature is closely linked to questions of subjectivity and autonomy, and the use of nature imagery takes its premises from that same cluster of questions. An outline of the enabling form of Hellenism and the Romantic landscape of Greece leads on to the wider and far-reaching question of the ideal and its material representation. From this perspective, some of the consequences for literary representation of the emergence of the Greek state become clear.Less
Moving beyond the conclusion of recent studies that place is symbolic and culturally constructed, this chapter historicizes those insights and traces them back to the central position of nature as landscape in post-Kantian and Romantic aesthetics. Here, landscape is thought extraordinarily suitable to embody universal concepts, among them that of freedom in particular. Nature is closely linked to questions of subjectivity and autonomy, and the use of nature imagery takes its premises from that same cluster of questions. An outline of the enabling form of Hellenism and the Romantic landscape of Greece leads on to the wider and far-reaching question of the ideal and its material representation. From this perspective, some of the consequences for literary representation of the emergence of the Greek state become clear.
