Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use,...

Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use,...

Contemporary translation studies have explored translation not as a means of recovering a source text, but as a process of interpretation and production of literary meaning and value. Translation and the Classic uses this idea to discuss the relationship between translation and the classic text. It proposes a framework in which 'the classic' figures less as an autonomous entity than as the result of the interplay between source text and translation practice and examines the consequences of this hypothesis for questioning established definitions of the classic: how does translation mediate the...

Virgil's Schoolboys adds a new layer of complexity to Virgil's already complex pedagogical afterlife. Reading the ancient Roman poet as an adventurous theorist of instruction, Andrew Wallace examines the relationship between his serial meditations on teaching in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, and the pedagogical theories and practices that dominated the spaces in which his poems came to be taught in the grammar schools of Renaissance England. Wallace argues not only that Virgil was a keen student of the elusive operations of instruction, but that vitae and scholia from antiquity to the...

Since at least 1939, when daily-strip caveman Alley Oop time-traveled to the Trojan War, comics have been drawing (on) material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history. At times the connection is cosmetic-as perhaps with Wonder Woman's Amazonian heritage-and at times it is almost irrelevant-as with Hercules' starfaring adventures in the 1982 Marvel miniseries. But all of these make implicit or explicit claims about the place of classics in modern literary culture.

Classics and Comics is the first book to explore the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern...

Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames takes as its subject adaptation of Greek tragedy in the last decades, arguing that rewritings of Greek tragic texts in this period can be used as a tool to uncover a significant dialogue with postmodernism. Despite the large number of staged and written adaptations of Greek tragic texts in recent years, the idea still persists that tragedy is incompatible with postmodernism, with the long-standing debate over the demise of the genre in the modern era undergoing a recent resurgence with the claim that postmodernism precludes tragedy both as an...

Dynamic Reading examines the reception history of Epicurean philosophy through a series of eleven case studies, which range chronologically from the latter days of the Roman Republic to late twentieth-century France and America. Rather than attempting to separate an original Epicureanism from its later readings and misreadings, this collection studies the philosophy together with its subsequent reception, focusing in particular on the ways in which it has provided terms and conceptual tools for defining how we read and respond to texts, artwork, and the world more generally. Whether...

This volume provides, for the first time, an extensive and wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between Romanticism and Roman antiquity. Encompassing literature, music, sculpture, film, history, politics, and scholarship from across Europe and the US, it assesses the influence ancient Roman culture has had upon Romanticism, and the influence Romanticism has in turn had upon our understanding of the ancient Romans.
Arranged in three sections - Romanticisms, Romantics, and Reception - the 20 contributions in this volume assess various shared themes and motifs, case studies from the...

Why is it that some films are called epics? Audiences know that such films will be large-scale, spectacular productions, but does the term have deeper cultural significance? In antiquity, epic was a prestigious genre whose stories ranged from the Trojan War to the founding of Rome, and dealt with important themes including heroism, the gods, military prowess, and spectacle.
In Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, Joanna Paul explores the relationship between films set in the ancient world and the classical epic tradition, arguing that there is a meaningful connection between the...

In War, Liberty, and Caesar, Edward Paleit discusses how readers and writers of the English Renaissance read and understood Lucan's (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, c. AD 39 - 65) epic poem on the Roman civil wars. It argues that the period between 1580 and 1650 in England, during which his text was much read, edited, discussed, imitated, translated, and quarreled over, can arguably be termed as the 'age of Lucan'. Looking at engagements with Lucan across a wide variety of literary forms, including poetry, drama, translations, and prose treatises, Paleit questions what made this Latin author so...