Whose Ancients & Moderns?

From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries—at the heart of what is called the French neoclassical age—poets, critics, and philosophers radically rethought how history shapes literature. Key to this rethinking was a new, and often disturbing, understanding of the cultures of antiquity that had been considered the foundation for later modern achievements. It is one of history's ironies that the modern period characterized as “classical” (or “neoclassical”) came to adopt a sharply critical distance in regard to the very Greco-Roman past that it apparently so admired. To understand the “shock of the ancient” is to wrestle with this basic paradox: the fracturing of historical time that fundamentally defamiliarizes classical antiquity was the work of an age that also often wished to coexist with that increasingly remote era.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Classical antiquity · Foundation (evidence) · Literature · Period (music) · Shock (circulatory) · Classical Studies and Philology · Classics · French Literature and Criticism · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

• David Hume, the Académie des inscriptions and the Nature of Historical Evidence in the Early Eighteenth Century

  Open Access•Pedro Faria•Modern Intellectual History•2020

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