ABSTRACT
George Steiner has claimed that ‘A suggestive history of Western moral, literary and political sensibility could be written in terms of the relative status, at given periods and in different societies, of Homer and Virgil’. 1 The ways in which Virgil has been important to twentieth-century France are indicated by the Virgilian passages that have been repeated intertexts throughout this book. The emphasis on the lost pastoral world of the Bucolics and on the Orpheus episode from the Georgies suggests that the age has become particularly sensitive to the Virgilian voice of exile. This notion is reinforced by the recurrent intertexts from the Aeneid. Allusions to the scattering of the Sibyl’s leaves and to the impossibility of Aeneas embracing his loved ones, to the multitude of shades peopling the Underworld and the numerous false journeys prefiguring the final arrival at Rome, have featured greatly in the works under discussion. Through them the reader gains an insight into the modern experiences of loneliness and exile, and the impossibility of making definitive sense of these experiences.
