Books in the Classical Presences series

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers have turned to classics to provide interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to inform their understanding. This volume reveals key insights into British cosmopolitanism, which sought its bearings in the ancient past in encounters with Qing Dynasty China.

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.

Postdramatic Tragedies explores the history of classical tragedy within postdramatic theatre from 1995 to 2015, drawing on a range of case studies of productions from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and continental Europe, including both widely known productions and works largely unknown in Anglophone scholarship.

Minos and the Moderns considers three mythological complexes that enjoyed a unique surge of interest in early twentieth-century European art and literature: Europa and the bull, the minotaur and the labyrinth, and Daedelus and Icarus. All three are situated on the island of Crete and are linked by the figure of King Minos. Drawing examples from fiction, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, opera, and ballet, Minos and the Moderns is the first book ofits kind to treat the role of the Cretan myths in the modern imagination.

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.

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.

This interdisciplinary collection, written by experts in their fields, addresses how models from ancient Greece and Rome have permeated Irish political discourse in the century since 1916. Topics covered include the reception and rejection of classical culture in Ireland; and the politics of Irish language engagement with Greek and Roman models.

This book investigates the ways in which ideas associated with the Celtic and the Classical have been used to construct identities (national/ethnic/regional etc.) in Britain, from the period of the Roman conquest to the present day.

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.

This is a fascinating study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. The authors ask why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle are so often adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedipus and the regressive obsession of Antigone, can articulate the postcolonial moment.

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 collection of essays constituting the first comprehensive study of the relationship between classical ideas and British colonialism. The contributors demonstrate that ideas about the Greek and Roman world since the eighteenth century developed hand-in-hand with the rise and fall of the British Empire.

By moving beyond the dominant perspectives on the Greek past, this volume re-imagines Greek antiquity and invites the reader to look at the different uses and articulations of the past both in and outside Greece, ranging from literature to education, and from politics to photography.

Sophocles' Antigone has been staged all over the world, and many of these productions have reconceived and remade the play to address local issues and concerns. This collection of essays explores the play's reception in numerous countries, as diverse as The Congo and Australia, Argentina and Japan.

African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.

The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day, and restores Seneca to a canonical position among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled.

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 collection of essays by a team of distinguished international contributors concerned with how Classic - mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese - texts become present in later cultures; how they are passed on, received and affect over time and space, and how they resonate in the modern.

A collection of essays by an international team of scholars on the part played by classical sources and images in the debates around the abolition of slavery. It shows that the ancient Greek and Roman slave was invoked both by abolitionists and by those who promoted and attempted to justify the custom.

Women writers are turning to Virgil and alluding to his poetry in a bid to explore modern preoccupations and concerns. Through an analysis of Virgil's presence in the work of contemporary women writers, this book identifies a new Virgil: one who speaks in female tones of the anxieties, pleasures, and threats of the contemporary world.

Classics in the Modern World explores the features and implications of a 'democratic turn' in modern perceptions of the ancient world. Exploring the relationship between Greek and Roman ways of thinking and modern definitions of democratic practices and approaches, it enables a wider re-evaluation of the role of classics in the modern world.

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.

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.

Son of Classics and Comics presents thirteen original studies of representations of the ancient world in the medium of comics. Building on the foundation established by their groundbreaking Classics and Comics (OUP, 2011), Kovacs and Marshall have gathered a wide range of studies with a new, global perspective.

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.

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.

Bringing the Odyssey together with contemporary literary texts, this volume offers new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home, prompting readers to ask new questions of that well-read text around the themes of improvisation, nostalgia, domesticity, and mobility.

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.

Athens in Paris explores the influence of ancient Greece on a group of seminal post-war French thinkers (including Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault) writing about modern politics. Miriam Leonard demonstrates the ways in which ancient debates about democracy and citizenship continue to be relevant to modern political and philosophical preoccupations.