Richard Jenkyns – författare

This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity. It is exact and patient in its probing for nuance and detail, but also bold, wide, and original in its scope. It combines the study of Virgil with the study of attitudes to nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

The achievements of the Roman world have profoundly affected European and world civilization. The original Legacy of Rome, edited by Cyril Bailey, was published in 1923 and has been widely read and enjoyed. Nearly seventy years on, this new edition, illustrated with 24 pages of plates, offers an entirely fresh assessment of the influence of ancient Rome on the literature, art, culture, thought, and governance of later times.Fourteen contributors from a variety of disciplines each bring their individual knowledge and experience to the subjects discussed. Classical scholars consider the influence of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, pastoral, satire, and rhetoric. Historians assess Rome's impact through the ages, and textual transmission. Art, architecture, law, drama, and language are also individually discussed. The varied approach and content of this new appraisal bear witness to the richness of the civilization which forms such a large part of our heritage today.

What is it about Jane Austen's writing that brings such pleasure? There are good, even great novelists who are not good storytellers, and there are highly gifted storytellers who write thoroughly bad books. Jane Austen was both a very good storyteller and a great novelist. How did she do it? Richard Jenkyns's sparkling study delights in Austen's craft, wit, and pathos. His deep reading of the novels illuminates the subtlety, depth, and innovation that lie within them. He explores the development of her style, storytelling, and characterization, her technical prowess, and her place in comparison with her contemporaries, with a grace and wit worthy of the subject herself. All who read this book will come away with their admiration for Austen deepened, and their pleasure in her work enhanced.

God, Space, and City in the Roman Imagination is a unique exploration of the relationship between the ancient Romans' visual and literary cultures and their imagination. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources, poetry and prose, texts, and material culture from all levels of Roman society, it analyses how the Romans used, conceptualized, viewed, and moved around their city. Jenkyns pays particular attention to the other inhabitants of Rome, the gods, and investigates how the Romans experienced and encountered them, with a particular emphasis on the personal and subjective aspects of religious life. Through studying interior spaces, both secular (basilicas, colonnades, and forums) and sacred spaces (the temples where the Romans looked upon their gods) and their representation in poetry, the volume also follows the development of an architecture of the interior in the great Roman public works of the first and second centuries AD. While providing new insights into the working of the Romans' imagination, it also offers powerful challenges to some long established orthodoxies about Roman religion and cultural behaviour.

The first book to re-assess the Oresteia for a new generation of Classicists. Bridging between the disciplines of Classics, literary studies, gender studies, moral philosophy, and theories of imagery, Jenkyns presents a close reading of the three plays and a sophisticated literary anaylsis that will become standard reading on the play.Rehabilitating the two central characters in the trilogy, Jenkyns gives a provocative and insightful new analysis of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, prompting his readers to reconsider scholarship and current trends of interpretation. He proposes a wide and liberal view of the trilogy as showcasing a heroic ideal with a greater unity than is usually argued. For Jenkyns the characters are sympathetic and the tragic gaze is strongly centred around an inward and emotional perception of minor as well as major characters.Brilliantly argued and lucidly written, this study is set to become an influential core reading of perhaps the most influential and significant drama of the Classical world.