As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

Part II centers Greece within British cultural heritage discourse, asking how British narratives about Greece shift after the Greek wars for independence produce a modern nation to vie with Britain’s depiction of itself as cultural (and material) heir to classicism. The temporal forms I identify in this part – inheritance and irony – define Britain in relation to Greece, both historically and geopolitically. Across Part II, I consider Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, their display in the British Museum, the conspiracy to whiten them on the eve of World War II, and the claims of universal cultural heritage that began in the nineteenth century and still feature in their exhibition. These narratives and their trajectory, I argue, demonstrate how classicism develops in and through cultural and eventually racial supremacy.

Chapter 3 shows how British writers (including Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and Percy Shelley) grappled with the question of who owned classical Greek culture in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. With Greece long under rule by the Ottoman Empire, Britain wrote itself as ancient Greece’s culture heir. Inheritance was the temporal form that facilitated this transfer, not only of the succession of culture but also of material, as I show in British arguments surrounding Lord Elgin’s acquisition of marble relics from the Parthenon. I end by considering Greek antiquities in the British Museum and the attendant conflicts about universal cultural heritage they continue to engender.

Like Europe, the Mediterranean is a British imaginary and a geographical reality. The term ’Mediterranean’ signifies the narrative of cultural origin and the history of maritime trade, militarism, and diplomacy. The chapter begins with an account of a neoclassical rotunda in Ickworth House, Suffolk, which exemplifies the interfused, recursive narratives and traditions which constitute Greco-Roman antiquity, before tracing those traditions across the medieval Troy narrative and the Romantic response to the Elgin Marbles. The theme tying the cases together, as a means of traversing the immense distances between the Homeric epics and the ongoing debate over the Parthenon sculptures, is the metonymic relationship between totality and fragmentation, which Keats calls ‘the shadow of a magnitude’. The fragment triggers the imaginative reconstruction of the whole, and, by claim of cultural heritage, informs the ambition to possess the whole. The emphasis on the dialectic of unity/fragmentation confirms the narrative of a shared, antique, Mediterranean monoculture to be riven with competing, contested or colonial histories – as expressed by the cultural patchwork of the Ickworth rotunda.