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The coda concludes the book's analysis of the way in which particular texts become apocalyptically legible or manifest. It does so by taking account of Spiegelman's self-reflexive meditation on the ethical relation between Maus' literary reception and the dead bodies of the Holocaust that haunt his text. The coda proceeds to compare the fate of two sets of numbers tattooed onto the arms of Anja and Vladek upon their internment in the concentration camp. While Anja later commits suicide by slashing her wrists, thereby fulfilling a fate already inscribed by her number, Vladek is given life by the priest's prognosticatory interpretation of his number. The book concludes by utilizing Benjamin's concept of the “now of legibility” to read the priest's messianic moment of interpretation as a fragile moment of resistance against the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

The introduction first showcases the effects of the “relative age of cultures” on the self-perception, self-representation, and cultural production of younger cultures by analyzing the relationship between “old Egypt” and “young Greece” as portrayed in Plato’s Timaeus. Noting the poverty of our conceptual vocabulary for cultural reception processes, it coins the term “reference culture” to capture the role of the older culture in the multi-faceted and intimate cross-cultural reception processes that were at work in the Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman constellations (which differed from the more limited and distanced Greco-Egyptian relation). The introduction then makes a case for the urgency of comparative studies in the Humanities and the world at large. In contrast to the casual flaneurism that comparative literature has sometimes been blamed for, this book claims that the challenge of our times is to respond to the “comparative imperative” that urges us to develop fine-grained comparative methods for large-scale comparisons of literary cultures around the globe as a means to understand the diversity of our pasts, define our identities today and shape a shared future.

This essay, which proceeds in three parts, focuses on the reception of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, in the post-conciliar magisterium and in important scholarly works on scriptural interpretation. In the first part, the author examines what DV itself has to say about biblical interpretation, highlighting, in particular, the internal tensions in the document between two sets of interpretative principles: the historical-literary and the theological-ecclesial principles, the latter stressing Scriptures’ larger canonical setting. The second part focuses on the post-conciliar receptions of the text, with an emphasis on the predominance in the immediate post-conciliar period of the historical-literary dimension, over and above the comparatively neglected theological-ecclesial principles. Part three makes the case that, so as to receive the whole of DV going forwards, there is at present a need to reincorporate the historical-literary reception back into its traditional, theological context.

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.

This chapter examines the synchronic renewals and the repurposing of Alexander the Great’s image in canonical English and Malay literatures. More specifically, it considers the transmission of the Alexander Romance and its common motifs into English and Malay as well as the shared strand of literary reception that link these traditions together as cousins rather than wholly separate. It also explores how both English and Malay literatures, invoking Alexander to mediate intercultural encounters, use him to fashion a vocabulary for a cultural politics of hybridity. More importantly, English and Malay literary traditions meet in connected themes mediated by Alexander and intersect in their shared deployment of him to figure intercultural relations arising from trade.

Pater’s Marius the Epicurean offers a dense engagement with a number of classical texts, most of which date from the second century AD. To explore the ways in which the narrator of Marius uses such texts to fashion its protagonist’s ‘sensations and ideas’, this chapter concentrates on the author whose presence is most surprising, the elegist Tibullus who wrote in the late first century BC and whose work was largely ignored in Britain in Pater’s own time. Although explicit reference to Tibullus is confined to the opening chapter of Marius, a much broader range of Tibullan themes, formal strategies of exposition, and issues within the scholarship than has been hitherto recognized permeate the novel; the portrait offered by his contemporary Horace also contributes significantly.