In 1915, the Panama–Pacific International Exposition announced San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake that had devastated the city. This chapter examines why the fair organizers and architects used classical architecture to promote San Francisco’s economic success and to articulate the continued narrative of American progress. Roman architectural forms were used extensively in many of the fair’s courts, including the Court of the Universe. The neo-antique architecture and sculpture of the Court of the Universe was also a crucial way for the fair organizers to demonstrate San Francisco’s unique position (due to its West Coast geography) to develop economic ties with Asia. Neo-antique architecture helped to prove that San Francisco was a modern city, fully recovered from the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and poised for cultural and economic greatness. This chapter also examines why other state and national pavilions were erected in a classicizing style, demonstrating the potency and flexibility of ancient architecture in conveying different aims. Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts was the fair’s architectural hallmark. His decision to evoke the ruins of ancient Rome for his Palace was a strikingly modern choice and stands in contrast to the celebratory architecture of the rest of the fair.

The traditional narratives of Austrian constitutional law are evolving. Long decried by scholars and practitioners to be ‘in ruins’, the Austrian Constitution has recently been lauded as ‘elegant and beautiful’ by Austria’s President, thus attempting a paradigm shift in the Austrian public’s perception of its constitution. While some textbooks claim it (still) is a merely formal, ‘value neutral constitution of game rules’ much in the spirit of Hans Kelsen, the Austrian Constitution and its interpretation show more and more signs of converging into a principled, value-oriented and purposive approach common in many other countries. The multinational legal legacy of the Habsburg Empire and its potential for understanding the European integration have been recognized as an asset, just as the ensuing creation of the world’s first constitutional court is of pride and the Austrian Constitution’s leading export.

Frieze, an everyday woollen fabric of domestic manufacture, serves in the Afterword as an image of resilience. Setting the more familiar images of romantic ruin to one side, the book ends by arguing for an Irish romanticism that scripts its own terms and knows its own strength.

The book’s final chapter turns to questions of spolia and converted buildings. Its discussion reorients conventional approaches to these debated topics by exploring architectural reuse through the lens of lived experience. Focusing on evidence for original doorways blocked in later phases of a building’s occupation at a series of repurposed sites, a case is made for studying conspicuous traces of a building’s former use as a window into social and somatic modes of temporality not captured by official commemorative inscriptions or building histories.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

This chapter charts the rise and fall of Virgil’s Carthage to explore some of the ways in which the paradoxical resonances of this city are productive of a sublimity that expresses its ambivalent status in the Aeneid. Under construction in Book 1, Carthage surges up before us offering a glimpse of the city’s glorious Augustan refoundation, but also a vision of the nascent Punic menace that would become Rome’s greatest enemy. In Book 4, Carthage has lapsed into an almost ruinous state threatening imminent collapse, a threat partly realised in the image of the city’s destruction that is a fantasy of its Roman conquest (4.669–70). From the start of the poem, though, it is clear that this city is not just Carthage, it is also Troy and Rome, so the vision of its destruction is not only a reassuring affirmation of Rome’s eventual triumph but a disturbing reminder of vulnerability. Virgil’s paradoxical Carthage encapsulates the Burkean sensation of the sublime ‘delight’ that ‘turns on pain’, its Augustan space sublime and thrillingly unstable.

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.