Books in the Classical Presences series

This volume explores the historical novel Quo vadis written by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, examining how Sienkiewicz recreated Neronian Rome so vividly and the reasons why his novel was so avidly consumed and reproduced in new editions, translations, visual illustrations, and adaptations to the stage and screen.

The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects. This volume explores the reception of classical antiquity in childhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in Britain and the United States, focusing on myth and historical fiction in particular.

Contributing to our understanding of Ovid, Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions, this book examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works.

A study of the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry. Elizabeth Vandiver offers a new perspective on that poetry and on the history of classics in British culture.

A selection of previously published articles, with a new Introduction, exploring the interaction between English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and those of ancient Greece and Rome, and emphasizing the element of exchange and dialogue between the two.

An exploration of the role of women writers in the Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome. The restrictions which applied to women's learning liberated them from the dullness of a traditional classical education, allowing them to respond imaginatively to classical texts using modern forms such as the novel.

An innovative, extensively illustrated study examining how classical antiquities and archaeology contributed to the production of the modern Greek nation and its national imagination, and how, in return, national imagination has created and shaped classical antiquities and archaeological practice from the nineteenth century to the present.

Although Hegel is generally understood as a thinker of modernity, this volume argues that his modernity can only be understood in essential relation to classical antiquity. It explores his readings of the ancient Graeco-Roman world in each of the major areas of his historical thinking in turn, from politics and art to history itself.

Classical reception in early modern Europe is often perceived in modern scholarship as being dominated by engagements with Greece and Rome. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by collectively arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe as part of a wider classical world.

Classicisms in the Black Atlantic explores how black authors and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity from the aftermath of slavery up to the present day to represent black voices and experiences, often revealing in the process effaced black presences in classical antiquity.

Charting the reception of Homeric epic in the work of women writers around the globe since 1914, and covering a range of genres and literary and political movements, this volume sheds new light on an understudied facet of Homer's afterlife and on how contemporary women continue to shape the field of classical reception in new and distinctive ways.

Examining a range of contemporary fictional works that adapt Greco-Roman myths of the descent into the underworld, from novels and comics to children's culture, this volume reveals the ways in which the catabasis narrative can be manipulated by storytellers to reflect upon postmodern culture, feminist critiques, and postcolonial appropriations.

No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great: his reception in the literary cultures of early modern Britain and Southeast Asia shaped early global literary networks. This study uses the parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance to trace cultural convergences and imperial rivalries.

An examination of the ways in which Virgil's poems were received and employed in the schoolrooms of 16th- and 17th-century England. Andrew Wallace argues that the Roman poet is an original theorist of the nature and mechanics of instruction.

Sappho is a towering figure in Western culture. This volume takes new steps in scholarship by focusing on Sappho's influence on Roman authors, and explores not only a critical phase in Sappho's reception history, namely that of ancient Rome, but also central Latin texts, which have had great influence on post-classical cultures, up until today.

This unique volume summarizes and reflects the work of a leading voice in the history of Classics in Britain, bringing together both previously published articles, now newly revised, and never before published work in an unparalleled overview of the history and sociology of classical education and scholarship between 1800 and 2000.

The Classics were core to Victorian and Edwardian public school curricula, yet texts with sexual content were regularly expurgated. This book explores the nexus between the Classics, sex, and education through the writings of schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge, which explore homoerotic desires and comment on Classical education of the time.

Transcending traditional studies of single translations or particular translation traditions in isolation, this is the first volume to offer a critical overview of Virgil's influence on later literature through the translation history of his poems, from the early modern period to the present day, and throughout Europe and beyond.

Reception studies has profoundly transformed Classics and its objects of study: while canonical texts demand much attention, works with a less robust Nachleben are marginalized. This volume explores the discipline from the perspectives of marginality, canonicity, and passion, revealing their implications for its past and future development.

This volume investigates a cross-section of performances of Greek tragedy on the contemporary American stage that have been produced by or for minority communities to challenge the long-standing stereotypes and political and social practices that have contributed to the marginalization of these cultures.

While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle-eighteenth century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has skewed our understanding of British Romanticism as being either a full-scale rejection of classical precedents or an embrace of Greece at theexpense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produceda changed understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book positions Rome as central to a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French Revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti-democratic, or "right royal." By exposing how Romanreferences helped structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacted fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book recasts how we view the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which wecontinue to struggle.

Mythographies-texts that collected and explained ancient myths-were indispensable tools of literary engagement during the European Renaissance. This volume focuses on neglected English mythographies written between 1577 and 1647, revealing a unique English take on the genre and unfolding the significant role myth played in broader culture.

In the eyes of posterity, ancient Rome is deeply flawed; yet its faults have not only provoked censure but also inspired wayward and novel forms of thought and representation. This volume is the first to examine this phenomenon in depth, demonstrating that the reception of Roman "errors" has been far more complex than sweeping denunciation.

The Irish Classical Self considers the role of classical languages and learning in the construction of cultural identities in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland. Focusing in particular on the "lower ranks" of society, it explores this unusual phenomenon through analysis of contemporary writings and records of classical hedge schools.

This volume celebrates the women born between the Renaissance and 1913 who played significant roles in the history of classical scholarship. Synthesizing incisive case-studies with overviews of the evolution of the discipline, it explores their legacy and provides scholars of today with the female intellectual ancestors they did not know they had.

This volume explores performances of Greek tragedies in Germany since 1800 as responses to particular political, social, and cultural milestones, shedding light on how, in a constantly changing political and cultural climate, they influenced the evolving cultural identity of the educated middle class over that period.

Ever since its publication in 1766, Lessing's Laocoon, or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry has exerted an incalculable influence on western thought. This volume offers an interdisciplinary reassessment on its 250th anniversary, exploring how Lessing's debts to the Graeco-Roman past enabled him to forge a new tradition of modern aesthetics.

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. The contributions presented here discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy.

This interdisciplinary volume analyses the importance of ancient Rome in the construction of post-classical Western homosexual identities.

This collection of essays presents a series of case studies which demonstrates the sophisticated ways in which different readers across the world have approached and interpreted Lucretius' remarkable poem De rerum natura over the centuries, from Lucretius' contemporary audience to the European Enlightenment.