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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 246 5 200 x 127 mm 256 pages
Frontispiece |
CONSTANTIN VOLNEY The Ruins, or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires 1811 Published in 1791, and in 1792 supplemented by the question and answer treatise The Law of Nature, Volney’s great philosophical work was required reading throughout the revolutionary period, even (with Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Werter) for Frankenstein’s Monster. Volney’s travels among the ruins of past civilizations in Egypt and Syria and his study of comparative religion provide him with lessons of reason, mortality and equality, marshalling his steps, as he puts it, ‘the way to a renovated France’. A new, free humanist society was in view. For Shelley especially, who independently pursued similar themes in Queen Mab, Volney was a kindred spirit. £48 $80 The book from which Felix instructed Safie was Volney’s Ruins of Empire. ...It gave me an insight into the manners, governments and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics; of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians; of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans - of their subsequent degenerating - of the decline of that mighty empire; of chivalry, Christianity and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants. |
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