Books in the Classical Presences series

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A collection of essays on the reception of classical myth within feminist writing across a wide range of subject areas, including poetry, philosophy, science, politics, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. The contributors show that myth has been central to the formulation and development of feminist thought and politics.

A collection of articles by distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplines (including philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, theatre, and the classics) providing a postmodern perspective on the ethical and political issues raised by the classical figure of Antigone, a woman who questions the role of the patriarchal state.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects and put to new uses. In this collection of essays, international scholars debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

Written by Derrida scholars, philosophers, and classicists, Derrida and Antiquity analyses a dialogue with the ancient world in the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. The volume is prefaced by a previously untranslated essay by Derrida, 'We Other Greeks'.

An exploration of the reception of Classics in the English-speaking Caribbean. Emily Greenwood argues that writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott have successfully adapted Classics to the cultural context of the Caribbean, creating a distinctive tradition.

A collection of essays exploring the extensive use of Latin and Greek literary texts in a range of recent poetry written in English. It contains both contributions from poets, including Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley, and essays from academic experts on the same topics.

A collection of essays dealing with different aspects of Ted Hughes's engagement with the culture and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Hughes is revealed as a leading figure in literary reception of the Classics in 20th century poetry, a sharply intelligent and sensitive reader of some of the world's foundational texts.

A fully illustrated study of the reception of classical sculptures in the early modern period. Viccy Coltman contrasts the culture of British eighteenth-century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior, with the focus upon individual specimens by classical archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later.

An investigation of literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke explores the imaginative construction of the Greek nation in light of the literary strategies and constraints of Romantic aesthetics.

This collection of eighteen essays, including one by Nobel Prize winning author J. M. Coetzee, explores the fascinating and nuanced relationship between translation and the classic text.

A collection of essays exploring the crucial place of Homer in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. It contributes to current debates about the nature of the Western literary canon, the evolving notion of world literature, the relationship between orality and the written word, and the dialogue between texts across time and space.

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.

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.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects and put to new uses. In this collection of essays, international scholars debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

Explores the reception of classical myth within feminist writing across a range of subject areas, including philosophy, science, politics, and psychoanalysis. This book claims that myth has been central to the formulation and development of feminist thought and politics, and examines the conceptual opposition between mythic and rational thought.

The story of how the Aeneid has been approached by various postclassical authors - including Shakespeare and Milton - not as an endorsement of the ideals of their societies, but as a model for poems that probed and challenged dominant values, just as Virgil himself had done centuries before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.