This chapter charts the rise and fall of Virgil’s Carthage to explore some of the ways in which the paradoxical resonances of this city are productive of a sublimity that expresses its ambivalent status in the Aeneid. Under construction in Book 1, Carthage surges up before us offering a glimpse of the city’s glorious Augustan refoundation, but also a vision of the nascent Punic menace that would become Rome’s greatest enemy. In Book 4, Carthage has lapsed into an almost ruinous state threatening imminent collapse, a threat partly realised in the image of the city’s destruction that is a fantasy of its Roman conquest (4.669–70). From the start of the poem, though, it is clear that this city is not just Carthage, it is also Troy and Rome, so the vision of its destruction is not only a reassuring affirmation of Rome’s eventual triumph but a disturbing reminder of vulnerability. Virgil’s paradoxical Carthage encapsulates the Burkean sensation of the sublime ‘delight’ that ‘turns on pain’, its Augustan space sublime and thrillingly unstable.

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.

No play of the period is more preoccupied with memorial artifice than John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: especially striking are three episodes involving the Duchess herself. In the opening scene her wooing of Antonio is coloured by oddly disturbing references to ‘a winding sheet’ and to ‘the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’; while in Act 4, her murder is prefaced by a piece of macabre theatre, when Bosola enters in the guise of an old man, announcing himself a ‘tomb-maker’ whose ‘trade is to flatter the dead’. Advising the Duchess that ‘I am come to make thy tomb’, he proceeds to discourse on the iconographic niceties of ‘fashion in the grave’, before bringing her ‘By degrees to mortification’. But the tomb he promises never appears, becoming instead a conspicuous absence at the centre of the action. Focusing on the haunted graveyard of the Echo scene (5.3), the essay argues that this absence is closely bound up with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of the idolized Protestant hero, Prince Henry, and thus with the dissident politics on which Webster's great tragedy is grounded.

The prologue provides an introduction to the history of Ichijōdani, as well as an overview of the three primary methodological interventions of the book. It reviews the scholarly literature on medieval urban life in Japan and explains this study’s distinctive contributions. The chapter also provides details on the theoretical literature in material culture studies and their articulations in this book. The Prologue ends with a discussion of ruins and the emphasis this study places on the violent destruction of Ichijōdani as a central and defining feature of the site.

Chapter 21, “Byzantium in Early Modern Istanbul,” highlights the multiple ways in which the Byzantine past was present in and had a bearing on the lives and imaginations of Istanbulites in the post-Byzantine city within the framework of four topics: rupture and ruin, structures of longue durée, translation and notions of antiquarianism, and, finally, the lives and the reflections of Byzantine monuments and spolia.

Chapter 3 focuses on space and the visual dimensions of the memory of the dissolution. Concentrating on the period between the late sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century, it examines the work of a number of antiquaries who produced topographies and images of former monastic sites. Taking previous scholarship on the ‘nostalgic’ element in antiquarian topographies of the dissolution as its main point of departure, this chapter addresses the role of monastic ruins together with those sites that were converted to new uses, both spiritual and secular, in shaping changing perspectives on the suppression. It argues that we should pay more attention to converted spaces – whether parish churches or private homes – which could function to reinforce the project to forget the dissolution across the generations. To support this argument, this chapter also features a substantial discussion of the visual afterlives of the dissolution. It illuminates what recent scholarship has described as a seventeenth-century visual culture of ‘pastness’, but also hypothesises the emergence of a parallel and equally powerful visual culture of the present. Ultimately, it suggests that topographical writing and images were genres in which senses of loss could converge with gain, past with present, and remembering with forgetting.

Heather Houser considers the conceptual frameworks of a topic that bears on nearly every other chapter in this Companion, contemporary “cli-fi” and ecocritical approaches to current literature. When writers presume transformational climate change as a starting point, rather than an abstract possibility, they narrate an “uncanny valley of familiarity and radical alteration” that extends, accelerates, or alters the logics of the present into near or distant futures of drought, warfare, destitution, and superstorms.

This chapter explores a mise-en-scène familiar to us from postapocalyptic movies and video games: that of a future American city emptied of human life and activity. After tracing this chronotope back to early nineteenth-century European romantic fantasies of the “last man,” the essay considers how it came to be applied, with variations, to American cities between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Examples include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois as well as those by largely forgotten authors, and encompass utopian and apocalyptic fiction as well as dystopian and postapocalyptic. Critics have largely characterized such visions of urban desolation as a negative, cathartic expression of some fear, whether of ethnic others, natural disaster, or nuclear warfare. This chapter, however, recovers the productive possibilities they offered. Vacated cityscapes empowered readers to reflect critically upon modern urban life, in particular new phenomena such as skyscraper architecture, technological infrastructure, the experience of surging crowds and webs of social interdependency, the suppression of nature, the impermanence of urban space, and racial segregation.

This chapter focuses on Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594). Both poems are dedicated to women from overlapping and affirmedly Protestant circles, focused around the Sidneys and the Dudleys: namely, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Rosamond), and Lucy Harrington, soon to be Countess of Bedford (Matilda). Yet Drayton and Daniel suffuse their poems with references to aspects of pre-Reformation devotional culture and flash-points of sixteenth-century religious controversy: indulgences, legendaries of saints’ lives, monasticism, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, pilgrimage, confession. Whilst some allusions can be read ironically, the deployment of these religious allusions is not consistently or straightforwardly critical. This chapter consequently explores the ambivalent shadow cast by these poets’ recourse to emblems of pre-Reformation piety and to the fault lines of Reformation ideology, and examines the way in which these complainants’ desire to tell their stories simultaneously activates memories of Reformation. It argues that, in doing so, Daniel and Drayton comment on the fictionality and potential transience of their own poetic memorials, and interrogate the way in which memory is posthumously preserved and contested in an age in which historical reputations were being rewritten, and which bore witness to deliberate acts of erasure.

With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.