'This volume brings together a remarkable array of leading experts on the place of the classics in literary culture - a collection that will drive scholarship on the romantics, their culture, in the larger contours of literary history for years to come.' Christopher N. Phillips, Lafayette College Re-establishes the enduring presence and value of classical literature in the Romantic era The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age reveals the extent to which writers now called romantic venerate and use classical texts to transform lyric and narrative poetry, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race and slavery, as well as to provide models for their own literary careers and personal lives. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics - including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded as a classical language - play a major role in what becomes labeled romanticism only later in the nineteenth century. The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but subtle interpenetration and mutual transformation. While romantic writers regard what they are doing as new, this attitude in no way prompts them to abjure valuable lessons of genre, expression, and judgment flowing from the classical authors they love. This volume disturbs categories that have become too settled. K. P. Van Anglen is Senior Lecturer on English, retired, at Boston University. He is the author of The New England Milton (1993), co-editor of Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (2008), and editor of the Translations volume (1986) in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. James Engell is Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of four books, his interests embrace the Enlightenment and Romanticism, rhetoric, and environmental issues. Cover image: Janus restrains Bellona, goddess of slaughter. Sculpture of marble by Johann Wilhelm Beyer COPYRIGHT Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur and Betriebsges.m.b.H./Photograph: Alexander Eugen Koller