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This chapter shows that Erich Korngold's compositional process and materials reflected a particular traumatic mode of modernism—the ruin. Here, recognizable fragments from the past recall an uncomfortable or contested history of decay and destruction. Ruinous art forms betrayed the “temporal and spatial doubts that modernity always harbored about itself.” While some manifest as a material fascination with destruction and demise, others constitute an aesthetic that enables the audience to think about the historicity of our condition and even experience hope. Korngold noted that his preference lay with the latter. But Korngold's Symphony in F-sharp, Op. 40 (1947–52), in its quiet references to earlier repertories whose musical lives were deeply entangled in the modern historical moment, signaled its own disturbing relevance to the ruins of the time—whether the crumbling facades of Korngold's beloved Vienna or his experience in America as an exile in a state of fracture and suspension.

The Old English poem known as The Ruin meditates on the material remains of a long-passed civilisation and has often been read as typical of the nostalgic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, but its reception history reveals how cultural memories of the Anglo-Saxons have been rewritten in the modern world and the importance of the idea of ruination to modern conceptions of the Middle Ages. This chapter constitutes the first extended study of the disciplinary and translation histories of The Ruin, traces the history of the poem from 1826 to the twenty-first century and explores the meanings of ruins in the Middle Ages and modernity.

This chapter reconsiders Wordsworth's understanding of Roman Stoicism. This subject was last discussed by Jane Worthington some seventy years ago, and its conclusions need to be revised, in light of advances in Wordsworth scholarship, and also in light of recent discussions of Stoic theories of emotion. Wordsworth knew the basic Stoic texts on emotion — primarily the letters of Seneca and Cicero's Tusculan Disputations — earlier than Worthington thought he did, and he both incorporates Stoic ideas and modifies them in his major lyrics beginning in 1797–98. The chapter briefly considers the portrait of the Pedlar from The Ruined Cottage, and then focuses on ‘Resolution and Independence’, in which the Leech-Gatherer is presented as a bizarre, and perhaps ironic, version of the Stoic sage.

The conclusion of Empire of Ruins recalls the book’s examination of ruin photography as it relates to modernity—the traumas of war and climate change. But it places that narrative within a larger context by relating this theory of American ruins to a historical conjunction between ruins and revolution that has been visible in European history for centuries. Most notably, it is visible in Hubert Robert, who painted ruins during the French Revolution, and in Joseph Gandy, who depicted John Soane’s Bank of England as a future ruin, emerging from the financial crisis of the 1820s. Thomas Jefferson, during the American Revolution, had the same fear of future ruin that Thomas Cole had in his epic series, The Course of Empire, painted in the 1830s. And in the revolutionary moment of the Great Depression, Stephen Vincent Benét imagined—in a classic work of speculative fiction—a future world in which the ruins of the present world would be discovered. That same trope, recalling Doré’s New Zealander, is used by contemporary artist Ellen Harvey in her satiric sculptural installation, The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C. The book ends with a reflection on J. B. Jackson’s famous argument for the necessity of ruins and whether our present trajectory will allow us to begin again.

This chapter looks at Beijing as a domestic space for the female artist Yin Xiuzhen, whose installation, The Ruined City (1996), depicts a tranquil Chinese family life threatened by fast urban developments. In the past years, Yin Xiuzhen had established herself as an avant-garde artist with feminist and environmental concerns, and The Ruined City focused attention on the so-called urban human ecology of Beijing from a postmodern feminist viewpoint. For Yin Xiuzhen, Beijing is the “ruined city” which has been transformed from an ancient town, rich with a “natural” and “cultural landscape,” into a postmodern jungle of callous construction and destruction. In this regard, The Ruined City can be read as a historical recollection or commemoration of Beijing, the old capital city glowing with natural beauty and human warmth.

In this chapter an impassioned reader of literature, specifically Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, reflects on the university and the love of reading. Our Mutual Friend provides an account of reading, association of ideas, transference, education and work. The chapter asks its readers questions inspired by the novel: ‘Who do you work for?’ And ‘What do you read for?’ It sweeps together the dust-heaps of Our Mutual Friend with environmental destruction, the ashes and cinders of poetry and deconstruction and Bill Readings’s influential notion of ‘the university in ruins’. It proposes a less mournful university inspired by Leo Bersani and by the ludicrous predicament and risky behaviour of Dickens’s great underachiever, Eugene Wrayburn.

This chapter begins with the axiomatic premise that nature was no friend to the Anglo-Saxons: exile into the wilderness often equated with both physical and spiritual death and the power of water was equally frightening. We have only to look to the quintessential locus for the image of the Anglo-Saxons’ distrust and fear of the sea, lines 850-866 of Christ II, which presents life as a journey over difficult seas. In Beowulf, the mere of Grendel’s mother gapes as a kind of hell-mouth, while even the fragmentary description of the mysterious baths in The Ruin uses language reminiscent of the destructive flame of Beowulf’s dragon. On the face of it, Old English poetry provides no evidence of practical uses for water except as a method of transportation; nevertheless, the poetic manifestations of Anglo-Saxon antipathy towards water may well demonstrate the ways in which the figurative language can denote the physical realities of sea, mere, and river during the period.

This chapter discusses some of the films made by George Cukor later in his career as Hollywood director, including The Blue Bird (1976) and Rich and Famous (1981). The Blue Bird was Cukor’s absolute nadir, ten times worse than A Life of Her Own (1950). It was a classic travestied, a financial and publicity catastrophe, and for a seventy-five-year-old director anxious to keep working, seemingly the end of the long road. But Katharine Hepburn came to the rescue. Her final work with Cukor were two small-scale films made for television: Love Among the Ruins (1975) and The Corn Is Green (1979). When Cukor got the call to direct Rich and Famous—a hip Hollywood comedy about women’s interrelationships and sexuality—in the summer of 1980, he had just turned eighty-one. Cukor died on January 24, 1983 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Gibbon’s story of Roman decline and fall has frequently inspired attacks on changing elements of modern society. These attacks claim one needs to defend tradition if one wants contemporary society to avoid falling like Rome. Since the late 1960s, Americans as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, and Ben Carson have used this comparison to attack the welfare system, feminism, and gay marriage. The idea has also been adapted by alt-right figures like Richard Spencer into a call for a restoration of Rome. The book concludes by surveying ancient, medieval, and modern figures like Seneca and Romanus the Melode who suggest how cultural, religious, and material elements of Roman life might have reinforced the power of ideas of Roman decline and renewal by encouraging people to feel a personal connection to the Roman past and the figures who shaped it.