Whither Quo Vadis? offers an engaging account of how the Roman world and its history are represented in film and the way in which the different adaptations reflect the shifting historical situations and ideological concerns of their own times.

• Explores five surviving film adaptations - Guazzoni's of 1912; D'Annunzio/Jacoby of 1925; Mervyn LeRoy's of 1951; the Italian TV mini-series of 1985 by Franco Rossi; and Kawalerowicz's 2001 Polish version
  
• Examines how these different versions interpret, select from, and modify the novel...

Homer's characters are often very far from an unreflecting struggle for status at others' expense. Rather than being a 'zero-sum game', their negotiations can be of an impressive delicacy, designed to protect the 'face' of the other. Gifts and visible deference are important measures of honour, but characters also care about what others really feel. This sensitive study reveals that at the beginnings of (surviving) Greek literature Homer's audience is expected to appreciate psychology and self-control of a very high order. Literary analysts, historians, anthropologists and indeed...

The 'Classic' narratology that has been widely applied to classical texts is aimed at a universal taxonomy for describing narratives. More recently, 'new narratologies' have begun linking the formal characteristics of narrative to their historical and ideological contexts. This volume seeks such a rethinking for Greek literature. It has two closely related objectives: to define what is characteristically Greek in Greek narratives of different periods and genres, and to see how narrative techniques and concerns develop over time.
The 15 distinguished contributors explore questions such as:...

The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect as messages, texts, practices, and traditions move and change, because issues of orality and literacy are especially complex and significant when information is transmitted over wide expanses of time and space or adapted in new contexts. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius' Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter. Repeatedly they return to certain issues. Writing and orality...