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This article identifies for the first time the ‘lone antiquary’, which Charlotte Smith refers to in her poem Beachy Head, as Rev. James Douglas, one of the most significant and interesting early archaeological writers. My contention is that not only do Douglas’s specific findings and theories about stratigraphy, fossilisation and the culture of Britain’s earliest inhabitants contribute to the historical, antiquarian background to Smith’s poem but also that the transformative nature of his poetics informs her work. In particular, both Douglas and Smith are concerned with the relationships between facts and fancy, rubble and aura, scepticism and belief. I argue that the barrows, which Douglas excavated and upon which Smith mused, were an important site for the development of the Romantic archaeological imagination and, as such, represent a suggestive contribution to the new Material Romanticism critical turn.

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles's Antigone and Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in the New York Times of “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

It has frequently been noted that there is no tradition of tragedy in Chinese literature. Yet, for centuries, China’s history has been punctuated by tragic events and its people must, as a culture, find ways of explaining or coping with this experience. This article compares Greek and Shakespearean tragedy with examples from Chinese literature and considers the different ways they confront similar issues of fate, justice and responsibility. It is argued that an examination of tragedy in China raises questions about Western concepts of tragedy, its generic form and the value it is conventionally accorded. Assumptions concerning catharsis or the moral good supposedly inherent in regarding the pain of others are interrogated in the cross-cultural encounter.

Tis false – we do care about ‘the authenticity of the tale of Troy’. I have stood upon that plain daily, for more than a month, in 1810; and, if any thing diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity. ... I still venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise, it would have given me no delight. Who will persuade me, when I reclined upon a mighty tomb, that it did not contain a hero? – its very magnitude proved this. Men should not labour over the ignoble and petty dead – and why should not the dead be Homer’s dead?

This essay discusses the renowned classicist of eighteenth-century England, Elizabeth Carter, and argues for a consideration of Carter’s work, in contrast to prior critics, as ambiguous and problematic. Because women were generally proscribed from a classical education and the few rarefied women who managed such an education against the odds were proclaimed marvels, Carter struggled with the dilemmas of her unusual, sometimes troubling position. Moreover, the lessons of pagan authors often contradicted Christian teachings, and these variant pedagogies proved difficult to reconcile no matter how canny one’s choices of ancient authors for translation (as Carter’s certainly were). This essay shows Carter struggling with the resulting tensions both in the course of her career and within individual translations.