Materialist Romanticism: The Matter of the Marbles [Hardcover]

A matter-based approach to the study of nineteenth-century Romantic artifacts centering on the removal of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens, Greece by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, and sale of the prized artifacts to the British Parliament for ?35,000 in 1816.

Dewey W. Hall delves into the intrigue surrounding the famed sculptures by reaching back in time to Democritus (460370 B.C.), Aristotle (384322 B.C.), and Epicurus (341271 B.C.) who theorized about the atom-the basis for the materialist tradition-and Lucretius's notion of the swerve inDe Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things)(c. 5549 B.C.). This study includes various artistic responses to the Parthenon sculptures via the verbal and visual as represented through George Gordon, Lord Byron'sCurse of Minerva(1811) andChilde Harold'sPilgrimage(1812), Benjamin Robert Haydon's sketches of the horse of Selene (1809) held at the British Museum, and John Keats'sEndymion(1818) and Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819).

A study of nineteenth-century Romantic literary artifacts centering on the removal of Parthenon sculptures from Athens and sale of the prized artifacts to the British Parliament.Dewey W. Hallis Professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.Taking up the material, historical, cultural, political, artistic and literary case of the Elgin Marbles,Materialist Romanticismtracks the material traces of the marbles, from their origin in the Pentelic quarries that supplied the Periclean building program, to Lord Elgin's controversial acquisition of them more than two millennia later. Dewey Hall moves fluently among archives and discourses, and integrates his deft readings of famous poems by Byron and Keats into an investigation capacious enough to consider phenomena as disparate as the chemical composition of marble and the massive eruption of Mount Tambora, which blighted harvests across Europe and thereby indireló(