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Contemporary poetry and classics

Oliver Taplin

in Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome

This chapter looks at the here and now and the unselfconscious use of Greek and Latin writers by contemporary British and Irish poets. In 1973 an enterprising garland-maker collected together some ... More

This chapter looks at the here and now and the unselfconscious use of Greek and Latin writers by contemporary British and Irish poets. In 1973 an enterprising garland-maker collected together some 850 translations from The Greek Anthology. Most of the versions by the fifty or so contributors were specially commissioned, and they included some excellent epigrams, some by poets already quite well known, including Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Peter Levi, Edwin Morgan and Peter Porter. This discussion states that this volume marks a transition, from an age when a project like this had been primarily the preserve of scholars, and when classical poetry was predominantly the preserve of the few, to the present age when it has been opened up to a wide range of creative artists.Less

Caribbean Classics and the Postcolonial Canon

Emily Greenwood

in Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

This final chapter argues that the study of the reception of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean needs to focus not just on the dialogue with the literatures of Greece and Rome, but also on the ... More

This final chapter argues that the study of the reception of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean needs to focus not just on the dialogue with the literatures of Greece and Rome, but also on the dialogue between Caribbean authors themselves. To this end, discussion turns to the Jamaican poet Figueroa, who many critics have identified as an important precursor for the New World classicism in Walcott's poetry. Similarly, Kamau Brathwaite's revision of universal history in X/Self is seen to offer an important framework for Caribbean Classics in view of the poet's contention that the Caribbean's history of catastrophe presents a logical vantage point from which to survey the global succession of empires leading back to Rome and beyond. The book concludes with the suggestion that anglophone Caribbean writers have recalibrated the canon so that they are the natural successors of Horace, or Ovid, writing from the provinces and holding the cultural centre.Less

The Study of Classical Antiquity at Göttingen

Michael C. Legaspi

in The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies

This chapter shifts briefly away from the study of the Bible and focuses on two classical philologists at Göttingen, important representatives of neohumanism: Johann Matthias Gesner and Christian ... More

This chapter shifts briefly away from the study of the Bible and focuses on two classical philologists at Göttingen, important representatives of neohumanism: Johann Matthias Gesner and Christian Gottlob Heyne. In the case of Göttingen, the study of Greece and Rome (the discipline of classics) offers a very close parallel to the study of the Bible. Gesner and Heyne were contemporaries of Michaelis who, like Michaelis, found themselves in a precarious but promising situation: to adapt the study of philology to the realities of the new university, or simply fade into the background. Gesner and Heyne adapted, but without embracing the fervent philhellenism of later Romantics. Their vision of a critically reconstructed antiquity fully intelligible to modern ideals resembles the picture of ancient Israel that Michaelis, through nearly five decades of tireless research and publication, labored to produce.Less

Sir Donald Tovey

David Manning

in Vaughan Williams on Music

Here indeed was the quintessence of Donald Tovey: unfailing memory, encyclopadic knowledge, and unerring artistic insight. Add to this a delightful literary style and a rare sense of humor, and one ... More

Here indeed was the quintessence of Donald Tovey: unfailing memory, encyclopadic knowledge, and unerring artistic insight. Add to this a delightful literary style and a rare sense of humor, and one can understand why the Reid professor has put the town of Edinburgh on the musical map. The programmes of the Reid concerts alone are enough to prove this. Therefore people all rush out to buy, beg, borrow, or steal each of his volumes of essays as fast as they come out; that on the ninth symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven reaches the summit of artistic analysis. Tovey's playing is said sometimes to be “unpianistic.” When he plays, the music seems almost to take visual shape. As a composer, his love and knowledge of the classics has led him along the great lines of musical thought by the narrow way right up the hill, and not along the way of destruction, to stumble, fall, and rise no more.Less

Just 15 Minutes a Day

Edwin L. Battistella

in Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody's Famous Language School

Chapter 9 looks at the advertising and cultural positioning of mail‐order book culture, focusing on the Harvard Classics and the Book‐of‐the Month Club.

Classics, Race, and Edwardian Anxieties about Empire

Emma Reisz

in Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire

This chapter examines links between British fears about the decline of empire during the Edwardian period, and Edwardian scholarship examining the collapse of classical empires. In a climate of ... More

This chapter examines links between British fears about the decline of empire during the Edwardian period, and Edwardian scholarship examining the collapse of classical empires. In a climate of rising anti‐imperial nationalism, some Edwardian imperial apologists considered the British Empire to be weak compared to its ancient counterparts, and attributed this vulnerability to the multi‐racial character of modern imperialism. However, some Edwardian classical scholars argued that race and racial difference had been equally significant in the decline of ancient empires, invoking supposed racial differences in antiquity to explain the decline of both Greece and Rome. Examples examined in detail in this chapter include Cromer's Ancient and modern imperialism and Goetze's Foreign Office murals. The chapter also contains an extended discussion of W. H. S. Jones's studies of malaria in ancient Greece and Rome, including consideration of the role played in Jones's research by Ronald Ross and other experts in tropical medicine.Less

New texts and old theories

Peter Parsons

in Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome

This chapter describes how the concept of ‘classical’ changes over time by the discovery of new texts. Renaissance scholars collected and printed what they could find. Yet returns soon diminished; ... More

This chapter describes how the concept of ‘classical’ changes over time by the discovery of new texts. Renaissance scholars collected and printed what they could find. Yet returns soon diminished; and the new science of archaeology could apparently do little to help. However, it gradually became apparent that the cities of the Egyptian Greeks preserved in quantity original books and documents in a way not possible in their motherland. And in one aspect, the papyri are an epiphenomenon of Hellenistic and Roman culture. The twentieth century added to the stock of Greek and Latin literature, slowly and piecemeal. Such finds reminds one how much is lost, and how here and there the lost may be found: new pleasures, new contexts, new interpretations, and new blood for the Classics.Less

The use of images: visual history and ancient history

R. R. R. Smith

in Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome

This chapter explores the visual aspect, a territory shared with archaeology and art history. The Greek and Roman world poured an astonishing amount of its surplus into expensive monuments and ... More

This chapter explores the visual aspect, a territory shared with archaeology and art history. The Greek and Roman world poured an astonishing amount of its surplus into expensive monuments and elaborate public images, and their study is naturally an important part of classical archaeology. Unlike many other archaeologies, this subject studies a world extremely well documented by abundant and diverse literary and textual evidence, and it is thus part of the wider classics project. The discussion explores some of the great gains made by recent work in this area and some of the remaining deficiencies. Gains have resulted from application of historically based questions, while deficiencies arise from the still largely untheorised nature of this subject's research and discourse.Less

Ciceronian correspondences: making a book out of letters

Mary Beard

in Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome

This chapter exemplifies the complexities of the surviving evidence, looking at the literary works of Cicero. The Letters of Cicero are one of the most extraordinary survivals from the ancient world, ... More

This chapter exemplifies the complexities of the surviving evidence, looking at the literary works of Cicero. The Letters of Cicero are one of the most extraordinary survivals from the ancient world, and a correspondence that ranks with the great letter collections of all time, from Abelard to Virginia Woolf. This chapter is an experiment in reading those Letters in a radically old-fashioned way. It poses a question: what difference does the order in which one chooses to read it make to our literary, cultural and historical understanding of the collection? It suggests that there is a strong cultural logic in the order of the letters preserved in the manuscripts. It also examines traditional books and Letters to Atticus and to Friends.Less

Navigating the Realms of Gold: Translation as Access Route to the Classics

Edith Hall

in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture

Classics as subject-area and a constituent of the curriculum stands in urgent need of redefining its role, now that so many courses are taught primarily, or indeed exclusively, through the medium of ... More

Classics as subject-area and a constituent of the curriculum stands in urgent need of redefining its role, now that so many courses are taught primarily, or indeed exclusively, through the medium of modern-language translations. This chapter argues that the phenomenon of the arrival of Greek and Roman authors in modern languages needs to be appreciated in full diachronic depth. It calls for a history of translations of the classics and explores the social implications of this. Translation, especially forms of translation linked to theatrical performance, has allowed the classics to be disseminated to an audience that is much wider and more diversified and internally conflictual than is usually assumed. Exploring the history and role of mass market translations, disinterring long forgotten vernacular versions of classical authors, appreciating the importance of performance as access route to the classics, and applauding the hard work and courage of the pioneers in the field could therefore all have significant roles to play in breaking down the sort of prejudices that, in an era of fast-expanding Higher Education, lead to the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans being discarded altogether. For translation history conducted along these lines can create a new and radicalised tradition that dispels the notion that the study of Greek and Latin has been dominated by an elite group, which was somehow mysteriously endowed with an accordingly refined sensibility.Less

The Global Kaleidoscope: How Egyptians Got Their Hamlet, 1901–64

Margaret Litvin

in Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost

This chapter presents the global kaleidoscope theory as a much-needed revision to the Prospero-and-Caliban model of postcolonial rewriting. To this end, the chapter summarizes the actual kaleidoscope ... More

This chapter presents the global kaleidoscope theory as a much-needed revision to the Prospero-and-Caliban model of postcolonial rewriting. To this end, the chapter summarizes the actual kaleidoscope of Hamlets available to Egyptian theatre professionals and audiences by 1964. It argues that the origins of Arab Shakespeare were varied; different sources gained importance in different periods. Nineteenth-century French sources helped plant the seeds of a decisive, heroic Hamlet in pursuit of justice. Direct-from-English translations, with a greater commitment to treating Shakespeare's plays as written texts, became part of the kaleidoscope by the 1930s, as did German-inspired Romantic readings of Hamlet's introspective depths. At the juncture of these competing approaches, the chapter considers a high-profile Egyptian production of Hamlet in 1964–65: an effort to mediate between the British and Soviet readings of Hamlet and a bid to claim Egypt's place on the world stage by showing mastery of the “world classics.”Less

A Trip Down Memory Lane:: Remaking and Rereading the Red Classics

Gong Qian

in TV Drama in China

This chapter examines how nostalgia for the revolutionary past provides ideas for the contemporary TV drama market. The term “Red Classics” (hong se jing dian) has appeared with regularity in Chinese ... More

This chapter examines how nostalgia for the revolutionary past provides ideas for the contemporary TV drama market. The term “Red Classics” (hong se jing dian) has appeared with regularity in Chinese media. These classics were created in the modern era, a conscious endeavor by the Chinese State to promote a revolutionary culture which would mold the socialist subject. The chapter begins by briefly setting the cultural backdrop against which the interest in the Red Classics was rekindled. It then identifies television's main narrative strategies to capture audiences and also considers the role of the state in regulating the production, and influencing the reception of, the genre.Less

Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond 1907–2001

Anthony Snodgrass

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 120, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, II

Nick Hammond stands in a class of his own among Fellows of the Academy. His scholarly achievement was shaped by many untypical factors. His lifelong devotion to education, in every sense and at every ... More

Nick Hammond stands in a class of his own among Fellows of the Academy. His scholarly achievement was shaped by many untypical factors. His lifelong devotion to education, in every sense and at every level from the secondary onwards, gave it an unusual direction: until late in his life, much of his research had been driven by his teaching. His boldness in venturing into widely diverse branches of Classics, together with his intensely personal view of the activity of research, is reflected in his own unclassifiable status; the fact that he had had no formal research supervisor of his own, nor was later in a position to attract a large following of research pupils, accentuated this. With little doubt, his best work was to be found in the fields where not only his exhaustive knowledge of the ancient sources, but also his personal virtues and experiences had full rein: the volume on Epirus, the trilogy on Macedonia, and the best of his battle-reconstructions where he had walked over the landscape.Less

Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster 1905–1974

Eric Handley

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 120, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, II

Tom Webster grew up in London and lived there for twenty years in middle and later life, when he was Professor of Greek in the University at University College, the scene of much of his most fruitful ... More

Tom Webster grew up in London and lived there for twenty years in middle and later life, when he was Professor of Greek in the University at University College, the scene of much of his most fruitful work. For seventeen years before that, he was Hulme Professor of Greek at Manchester, taking up his appointment at the age of twenty-six, as the University recalled with pride and affection when it made him, in 1965, an honorary Doctor of Letters. He began his academic career with eight years (mainly) at Oxford, as an undergraduate and then a young don at Christ Church, with a fruitful interlude at Leipzig; he ended it with six years at Stanford, as Professor of Classics and then Emeritus. At and after the end of the First World War he was a schoolboy at Charterhouse; during the Second World War he served as an officer in Military Intelligence.Less

The Beauty and the Scandal of the Cross

Richard Viladesau

in The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance

Christianity has always had an “aesthetic” theology: an understanding of faith that is truly reflective but whose reflection is embodied in artistic modes of thinking and communicating. This more ... More

Christianity has always had an “aesthetic” theology: an understanding of faith that is truly reflective but whose reflection is embodied in artistic modes of thinking and communicating. This more primary aesthetic theology is important as a source of the faith tradition and as a parallel reflection on it. The historical relationship between the aesthetic and conceptual mediations of theology is complex: Christian art has frequently functioned as an illustration of dogma, but it is also an independent mode of understanding that goes beyond doctrinal formulations and is sometimes in tension with them. The cross provides a particularly fruitful subject for the study of this relationship. As the central symbol of Christianity, it embodies the paradox of the scandal of Christ’s ignominious death becoming a locus of beauty. This study compares classic paradigms of conceptual theology with styles of Christian art.Less