Now and Rome: Lucan and Vergil as Theorists of Politics and Space

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Now and Rome is about the way that sovereign power regulates the movement of information and the movement of bodies through space and time. Through a series of readings of three key Latin literary texts alongside six contemporary cultural theorists, Ika Willis argues for an understanding of sovereignty as a system which enforces certain rules for legibility, transmission and circulation on both information and bodies, redefining the relationship between the 'virtual' and the 'material'. This book is both innovative and important in that it brings together several key strands in recent thinking about sovereignty, history, space, and telecommunications, especially in the way it brings together 'textual' theories (reception, deconstruction) with political and spatial thinking. It also serves as a much-needed crossing-point between Classical Studies and cultural theory.

Reviews

'Ika Willis' brilliant analysis of the politics of territoriality in Rome and the contemporary world represents the best work in theoretically informed approaches to classics and classically informed approaches to theory. It is a masterful demonstration of how, in Derrida's words, the "very ancient" recurs in the "very modern", and an eloquent testimony to the untimely modernity of antiquity.' Miriam Leonard, Lecturer in Greek Literature and its Reception, University College London, UK -- Dr Miriam Leonard
"This is an extremely important book. Not only is its scholarship impeccable it forms part of a systematic rethinking of the Classical heritage. Rather than looking to the past for either edification or consolation Ika Willis reworks the tradition by looking at the 'Romaness of now'. In so doing she makes 'Rome' part of the present. Drawing on leading figures within the European philosophical tradition she has written a work on Lucan and Vergil that allows for De Bello Ciuili, the Georgics and the Aeneid, to be read as contributing to a rethinking of the exigencies of the political today." -- Andrew Benjamin, Monash University, Australia

Author Bio

Ika Willis is Lecturer in Reception at the University of Bristol, UK.