"The concept of revolution as we understand it today did not exist in antiquity. Despite the word's Latin etymology, only later did it take on its present connotation of a convulsive or irreversible moment of transformation. This book looks to the ambiguity at the heart of the term to unravel the complex temporalities involved in modernity's yearning for the new, examining the reception of the ancient concept during decisive years of revolutionary practice in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. From the French Revolution to the feminist and queer movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, modern revolutions have repeatedly appealed to antiquity. Showing how theorists including Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Mahatma Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, and Jacques Derrida engaged classical models from Heraclitus to Augustine, Miriam Leonard uses the themes of time, genre, and fraternity to explore antiquity's conceptualization of continuity and rupture and how this has served the ongoing quest to found political utopia"-- Provided by publisher.