“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 64-65

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 142

Part 2: Metaphysical Rebellion
The Rebel (1951)
Context: The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

Source: Dynamics Of Theology, Chapter Six, Scripture and Theology, p. 118

Part 5, Chapter 4 (p. 246)
Artifact (1985)

Interview with Robert McPhillips http://www.danagioia.net/about/mcphillips.htm (December 1991), published in Verse (Summer 1992) <br class="br">Interviews

Source: Civilizing Ourselves: Intellectual Maturity in the Modern World (1932), p. xi, Foreword

Book I, ch. 4.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)