Time and Antiquity in American Empire

This is a book about two empires - America and Rome - and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, it tracks how writers and artists generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial U.S. state - both in seeking to justify and perpetuate it, and as a means to resist and critique it. Time and Antiquity in American Empire takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire - republicanism and slavery - to the popular genres that have reimagined America and Rome and their sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. But through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, Roma Redux also builds a more fundamental inquiry about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within and across historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a grasp of historical temporality better understood through metaphors of interconnection - constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, it suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read and how we might yet read.