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Chapter One establishes the book's theoretical and methodological context by siting it within recent developments in postcolonial studies, reception studies, and theories of tragedy. Taking as its methodological parameters the work of Gilroy and Bernal on the Black Atlantic and Black Athena, it introduces the construct of the ‘Black Aegean’ as the zone of cultural transmission among Africa, Ancient Greece, and contemporary Europe. Other issues in postcolonial studies, such as the nature of canonical counter-discourse, and the possible identity of the United States as a postcolonial society, are analysed. The chapter also enters into dialogue with recent writers on classical reception, and develops further the theory of classical reception by positing a version of reception that has learnt from deconstruction and so highlights its self-consciousness and recursivity. The final section of the chapter discusses theories of tragedy, supplementing Steiner with Soyinka.

This introduction explains the overall critical framework of the collection and provides a brief overview of the book’s topics and goals. In so doing, it explores Ovid on the early modern stage; the interconnections between Ovid, the classical concept of imitatio, and contemporary adaptation theory; the relationship between classical reception studies and adaptation theory; the interplay between Ovid and Shakespeare adaptation/appropriation studies. Following this discussion, the introduction describes the organizational structure and rationale of the book and previews the chapters, noting how sections and chapters relate to each other.

This chapter examines the reception of Classics in the work Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and compares Césaire's engagement with the cultures of Greece and Rome to that of the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite. By comparing how these two Caribbean poets from different generations, the one Francophone, the other Anglophone, have used Classics in their expression of black cultural identities, the chapter reviews the concept of black classicism — the idea that there is a coherent reception of Classics in different black traditions. Rather than simply rejecting or affirming black classicism, it is argued that the idea of dislocation / dys‐location is central to Caribbean classical receptions, as authors attempt to relate the different black cultures which are present in the region.

This prologue to Cowboy Classics overviews the growing interest in classical receptions: the study of how the classical world has been represented since antiquity, guided by the belief that these examinations can enhance the understanding of both the receiving society and the ancient one. After distinguishing classical receptions from the earlier classical tradition movement, which focuses on influence rather than dialogue, this chapter acknowledges objections to receptions studies from scholars both outside and within the field of classics, including the particular problem of comparing classical works with modern film – collaboratively-produced visual works often considered lowbrow compared to the elite literary texts of antiquity. Drawing on the work of filmmakers, teachers, and receptions scholars, this prologue argues for cinematic productions as legitimate visual texts of comparative value not only pedagogically, but also culturally, in that mainstream film, like classical epic, embeds its culture’s most closely held assumptions and worldviews. Finally, this prologue considers the specific problem of receptions studies like the one undertaken in this book – those with no evident direct connection to antiquity – arguing that these allow more focus on meaning rather than influence while bringing past works into present relevance rather than vice versa.

This introductory chapter investigates the context in which Martin Delrio’s edition of Senecan tragedy, the Syntagma tragoediae latinae (1593/4), appeared. It explores the value of a classical education in late sixteenth-century Catholicism. Despite the Society’s later reputation in this field, Delrio’s Syntagma was only the second Jesuit edition of a classical text to appear in print. Traditionally depicted as a critique of Seneca, this chapter argues that Delrio’s Syntagma should instead be read as a carefully calibrated defence of an author whose moral teachings early modern Christians could not easily put to one side. The chapter also introduces the reader to Senecan tragedy and its reception in the early modern period.

This introductory chapter first presents the theoretical and methodological approaches used in the book as a whole and then provides an overview of the chapters in order to illustrate the contributions of the collection — the first few that are entirely devoted to the study of ancient Greek women on screen — to two major interdisciplinary areas: classical reception studies and gender studies. It then argues that an exploration of the diverse ways in which the women of Greek myth and history have been resurrected, used, and abused on film leads to conclusions important for classicists and cultural historians alike. Filmic recreations of classical antiquity are not neutral. They are deeply implicated in contemporary aesthetic, socio-moral, and political discourses, and employ the past as a vehicle whereby to touch upon prevailing ideas about sexuality, the position of women in modern societies, family, social structures, ethnicity, war, religion, and the cinema itself.

The little-known figure of Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge is introduced to the reader, and his clandestine writings and importance for the history of sexuality and Classical Reception are outlined. A brief biography sketches Bainbrigge’s education at Eton and Cambridge, his many homosexual friends, and his career as a schoolmaster at Shrewsbury. The Introduction examines his participation in a secretive culture in which men shared private homoerotic writings with each other. It examines Bainbrigge’s wartime friendship with Wilfred Owen, and his own war poetry, in the context of scholarship on homoeroticism and First World War poetry. It lays out the way in which classical education and the history of sexuality are intimately linked, exploring the institutionalization of the Classics in public schools, attempts to censor ancient sexuality, and sex education.

The Afterword reviews the theoretical and archive-building contributions of this collection as a whole and argues that we can find a visual allegory of the intellectual processes of reception that is emblematic of this volume’s conversations about the current trends and aspirations of classical reception studies in a sculptural group entitled ‘Transmission’ by the American artist Leo Friedlander. This 1934 pair of reliefs—‘Radio’ and ‘Television’— sit high above the pylons flanking the 50th and 51st Street entrances to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City as a clear visual allegory. This Afterword shows that the dynamic engagement of the various figures in this composition with invisible electronic forces, their architectural setting, and each other highlights the two-way, active nature of all reception study, its real demands on the reader or viewer, and its potential impact in the public arena.

In the introduction Dufallo lays out the volume’s main arguments, briefly summarizes its contents, explains its relation to recent work in classical reception studies, and advances its theoretical claim in response to the poststructuralist view of classical reception advanced especially by Charles Martindale. All reception could be considered “error” insofar as it involves “misreading” in the sense elaborated by Harold Bloom. But the essays in this volume reveal specific ways in which reception’s transgressive content may relate to its transgressive form or style because of the investments of receivers in a future that will view that content differently: the particular social, cultural, or political projects in which authors, artists, etc. participate as they set in motion the infinite malleability of signs. This foregrounds a pair of issues that have figured centrally in recent debates over classical reception: its relation to collective, as opposed to individual, receivers and to the future.

The Introduction discusses the way in which responses to Roman homosexuality have been overlooked by scholars interested in the formation of modern homosexual identities and proposes that the neglect of Rome in classical reception and the history of sexuality is largely a consequence of the idealization of Greek homosexuality as spiritual and desexualized by early homosexual activists. It analyses the history of the reception of Greek ‘virtue’ and Roman ‘vice’ from Edward Gibbon, Jeremy Bentham, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, to George Cecil Ives and Edward Carpenter. The Introduction suggests that Rome has provided an alternative and more flexible model than Greece for those seeking an ancestor for their desires and identities and interrogates cultural connections between modern homosexual identities and Roman sexual mores. It argues that Rome provides fertile ground for those with a queer historical impulse.

Starting with an examination of two readings of Lucan in the hitherto little-known play Cinthias Revenge (1613), by the English lawyer and satirist John Stephens, the introduction argues that Lucan’s sharp rise in popularity during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the equally pronounced revival of interest in the Bellum Ciuile amongst classics and English scholars over the last thirty years, makes a study of Lucan’s Renaissance reception timely and topical. Drawing on the ‘sociology of reading practices’ outlined by Renaissance scholars such as Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, William Sherman and others, it argues that firstly responses to Lucan must be situated in relation to the reading habits and assumptions of their time, rather than read through modern accounts of his text (especially those structured teleologically around ideas like the epic tradition); but that it is also necessary to recognize the specific dynamics of individual engagements within a narrative of historical conflict and change. It stresses the importance of political experience and structures of feeling alongside political ideology for understanding Lucan’s reception.

This introductory chapter explores the key themes of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, and introduces the structure of the work, the essays in question, and contemporary debates to which the collection is responding. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, the authors argue that the essays in the volume demonstrate the productive results that issue from re-examining historical relationships between modern classicism and the construction of race and racial hierarchies, as well as the making and remaking of various forms of classicism by intellectuals, writers, and artists circulating in the diasporic world of the Black Atlantic. These explorations provide grounds for challenging racialized visions of the classics as a white European heritage that have re-emerged in contemporary politics, and for reimagining the role of classical humanism in anti-racist struggles.

The volume’s introduction sketches the scope of Lessing’s Laocoon and reassess its legacy on the occasion of its 250th anniversary. It outlines Lessing’s arguments about the ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of poetry and painting, while situating Lessing’s project within Enlightenment ideas about the classical past and contemporary aesthetic criticism. The editors also lay out the overall purpose of the volume and introduce each of the chapters that follow, explaining the need for a cross-disciplinary approach.

This chapter discusses how classical reception research benefits from and can also potentially contribute to modern Greek studies (in terms of subject matter and methods) and vice versa. Both fields deploy constructs of exceptionality, although these differ in their genesis and their impact on cultural politics and on paradigms of authority, genealogy, and power. Exploring notions of exceptionality and distinctiveness also involves consideration of tensions between specificities and more globalizing approaches. The discussion distinguishes between overt and covert notions of exceptionality, and turns attention to some problems of handling ‘benign’ and ‘malign’ constructs. The seductive allure for classicists of Isocratean ‘soft’ exceptionality is identified (Panegyricus 50). The chapter suggests that comparisons between models of exceptionality in modern Greek studies and in classical studies can aid self-reflexive analysis in both fields