Anna Brunton
DPhil in Literature and Arts
Thesis
Poetry, Politics and Porticoes, Whig use of the metaphor of ancient Greece c. 1710-1780
Research abstract
According to the historian Alessandro Arcangeli, cultural history is about ‘the ways in which people of the past oriented themselves as individuals and groups, towards other individuals, groups, regions, countries’, and in this context, culture itself is defined as ‘a mental map with which the people we study orient themselves in their specific worlds’. This thesis explores one specific mental map used by a particular group to define itself both politically and aesthetically; more particularly, the thesis examines how eighteenth century Whig aristocrats and the writers they patronised used the metaphor of ancient Greece to portray ideals of politics, taste, and behaviour. Looking back to ancient Greek philosophy and history provided a parallel for the political situation in England, with ancient Greece’s continuous battles against the tyrannical Persians understood as a proxy for the role of Britain and its Protestant allies against the political ‘other’ of Catholic Europe.
The methodology chosen is that of conceptual metaphor theory. This approach is generally used to examine the values mapped on to contemporary political language; however, this thesis takes an original approach by applying this method to historical texts.
Supervisor(s)
Professor William Whyte, St John’s College, https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-william-whyte
Dr Carly Watson, https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/profiles/carly-watson
Biography
I began the DPhil in Literature and Arts in 2017, as one of the first cohort, having finished the Mst in 2015.
In 2019 I organised a panel of four speakers, chaired by, for the ISECS conference in Edinburgh’
In 2020 I won the International Society for Cultural Historians post-graduate essay prize. The essay is a summary of my use of conceptual metaphor theory, and how I have applied it to poetry, prose, and architectural text, and was published in 2022.
Prior to the Mst, I studied English Literature with the Open University to post-graduate level; my first degree was in music at the University of Birmingham. I also have a BSc in Earth Sciences with the Open University.
I have found parallels between studying geology and cultural history: both look beneath the surface to find deeper layers of meaning, often missed by those with an untrained eye.
Publications
‘‘Still May these Attic Glories Reign’: How eighteenth-Century Whig taste was shaped by a political metaphor,’ Cultural History, 11/ 1 (Edinburgh, 2022).
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/cult.2022.0256
Papers and lectures
Papers given:
2018, 3-4 September: Liberty, simplicity, masculinity: the metaphor of ancient Greece in Whig rhetoric 1711 -1750. BSECS post graduate and early careers conference, Aix-en-Provence.
2019, 14-19 July: Poetry, Politics, and Porticos: Antiquities of Athens and the mapping of political identity onto ancient Greece. This paper was given as part of the architecture panel which I organised on the theme of ‘History and the Architect: Shaping Identities through Publications and Design’, at the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference on ‘Enlightenment Identities’, Edinburgh.
2021, September: LIBERTY abroad Walks unconfin’d’:The Whig mapping of Ancient Greece on to poetry and place. ‘The Prospect of improvement: A Blue Stocking Landscape’ conference, Hagley Hall, Birmingham, supported by Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online [EMCO] and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Research interests
The power of metaphor and language-use in creating a power imbalance; the politics of place (cultural geography); taste (aesthetics) and the politics of architectural design; eighteenth-century Whig politics; Jacobite symbolism; eighteenth-century interpretations of the moral philosophy of Plato; the continuation Renaissance ideas of civic humanism into the eighteenth century.
