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Discipline and Revolution: Classics in Victorian Culture

Simon Goldhill

in Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity

This book explores the dynamics of Classics in the nineteenth-century, focusing on art, opera, and fiction and how artworks come to stand for a self-aware statement about modernity—through the ... More

This book explores the dynamics of Classics in the nineteenth-century, focusing on art, opera, and fiction and how artworks come to stand for a self-aware statement about modernity—through the classical past. It raises new questions and new understandings in three major areas of scholarship: nineteenth-century studies, Classics, and the so-called Reception Studies. It examines the discipline of Classics and its place in Victorian culture, as well as some very strong challenges to the Classics as a story, which constitute a need for a major revision of the account. In particular, it considers the relationship between Classics and sexuality. It also discusses the most important revolution of the nineteenth century, and how this affects our understanding of a discipline as a discipline: the loss of the dominant place of Christianity in Victorian Britain.Less

Introduction

Melanie J. Wright

in Moses in America: The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative

This chapter outlines the theory and methodology that underpins the rest of the study. It touches on the history of literary and artistic representations of Moses. It then describes cultural studies, ... More

This chapter outlines the theory and methodology that underpins the rest of the study. It touches on the history of literary and artistic representations of Moses. It then describes cultural studies, approaches to religion, and the discipline of reception studies, both of which inform the study. Finally, it discusses the contemporary expansion of the concerns of biblical studies, and sketches key features of American religious life as they relate to the study – more particularly, the use of Exodus typology in American public life.Less

Introduction

Todd W. Reeser

in Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

The introduction presents the methodology and basic arguments of the book along with a chapter outline. The contributions to sexuality studies, translation studies, and reception studies are outlined.

Introduction: Representing “Ovids” on the Early Modern English Stage

Lisa S. Starks

in Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre

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 ... More

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.Less

Practising Classical Reception Studies ‘in the Round’: Mass Media Engagements with Antiquity and the ‘Democratic Turn’ towards the Audience

Amanda Wrigley

in Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn?

This chapter argues for a refinement of current methodological practice within classical reception studies founded on the existence in the archives of a substantial amount of evidence for historical ... More

This chapter argues for a refinement of current methodological practice within classical reception studies founded on the existence in the archives of a substantial amount of evidence for historical audience opinions on BBC Radio and BBC Television engagements with ancient Greek and Roman culture. Specifically, the simplistic Jaussian equation of ‘production’ and ‘reception’ must be re-thought; an alternative model founded on the idea of ‘engagement’ is promoted. The existence of a rich mine of evidence for audience engagement for mass media opens up new possibilities for classical reception studies practice even in those few areas where genuinely no similar evidence exists. Furthermore, an ‘in the round’ study of engagements with antiquity is advocated—that is, from as many different perspectives and in as many contexts as the available evidence allows, rather than along the customary one- or two-track approach along well-trodden literary, aesthetic or political paths.Less

Introduction

Peta Mayer

in Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality and the Queer Nineteenth Century

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac ... More

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.Less

Introduction: Ecce Sappho

Thea S. Thorsen

in Roman Receptions of Sappho

Within a framework that shows how Sappho’s reception in antiquity has important implications for Sappho scholarship, our understanding of Roman poetry, and of classical reception studies in general, ... More

Within a framework that shows how Sappho’s reception in antiquity has important implications for Sappho scholarship, our understanding of Roman poetry, and of classical reception studies in general, the introduction outlines the extant output of Sappho, including the newest Sappho text (2016), as well as the chapters of the present volume. The introduction departs from three Sappho scholars, Welcker (1784–1868), Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), and Robinson (1880–1958), and reflects on the scholarly implications of how their times were ideologically different from ours. By revisiting important evidence for Sappho’s ancient reception, such as the Parian Marble, coins, figurative representations of Sappho, and considering recent papyrus finds from the Roman era, the introduction zooms in on Roman literature, which is the main focus of the present volume. Then there follows a brief presentation of Sappho’s extant output and an ample thematic presentation of the chapters in the volume. Finally, the introduction discusses Shane Butler’s new concept of Deep Classics in the context of Sappho’s Roman reception, and points towards another metaphor, this time from art, as a means to pursue future reception studies, using the restored Sappho fragment that was retrieved in 2004, known as ‘Posthumous honour for Sappho’, to illustrate the point.Less

Introduction

Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus

in Marginality, Canonicity, Passion

The introductory chapter considers the discipline of classical literature as a field in tension between canonization and marginality. On the one hand, it devotes particular attention to the role ... More

The introductory chapter considers the discipline of classical literature as a field in tension between canonization and marginality. On the one hand, it devotes particular attention to the role played by reception studies, the classical tradition, and their more recent declinations. On the other hand, it discusses the implications of the particular disciplinary constellation of classics for an academic career and for the academic profession, which are differently organized in continental Europe and in the Anglo-American world. The main concern here is not to discuss or contest the idea of canon in itself—its various cultural, ideological, and political implications, as explored for instance in postcolonial studies—but rather to explore canonicity as an invisible, yet nonetheless ruling principle within the disciplinary discourse and scholarly practice of classics.Less

Introduction: Decolonizing Antiquity, Heritage Politics, and Performing the Past

Dimitris Tziovas

in Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture

The Introduction outlines the aims of the volume and maps out transitions, debates, and new directions in the reception of antiquity in Greece over the last few decades, thus providing the background ... More

The Introduction outlines the aims of the volume and maps out transitions, debates, and new directions in the reception of antiquity in Greece over the last few decades, thus providing the background against which the chapters in the book should be read. A series of partly overlapping transitions currently taking place in the area of modern Greek classical reception studies are identified, involving shifts from continuity to diversity, elite to popular receptions, texts to performances, traces to uses, and eternal glory to critical history. The range of the volume is also highlighted. Covering a period stretching from the twelfth century ce to the present day, it looks at a variety of cultural practices and aspires to offer new perspectives in re-imagining the past and rethinking the role of antiquity in shaping modern Greek culture and its institutions.Less

Afterword

S. Sara Monoson

in Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn?

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 ... More

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.Less

Introduction: “Roman Error,” Dangerous and Inspiring

Basil Dufallo

in Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws

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 ... More

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.Less

Beyond the Comforts of Influence: Deep Comparisons

Wiebke Denecke

in Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons

Current debates about “world literature” focus mainly on modern conditions and literatures. Also, with the recent historicizing turn in many fields the study of reception has become the predominant ... More

Current debates about “world literature” focus mainly on modern conditions and literatures. Also, with the recent historicizing turn in many fields the study of reception has become the predominant mode of cross-cultural and comparative literary study. But what about the world’s enormous premodern literary heritage before the advent of global modernity and the interaction among previously far-flung literary cultures? Recent multi-volume world literature anthologies give us a sense of the sheer volume of texts that up to the early modern or even modern periods were produced in distinct literary traditions without direct historical connection. It is imperative to advance methodologies for comparison beyond the comforts of influence. This book proposes the methodology of “deep comparison,” moving away from formalist comparisons of literatures to functional comparisons of literary cultures. This approach replaces the detection of “ellipsis” (e.g. epic in East Asia) with the heuristic exploration of “catachresis,” the master trope of deep comparison, which approximates divergent structures of literary cultures to throw them in sharper relief. The book also aims to bring into dialogue various layers of comparison: of artifacts (texts), cultural systems (literary cultures), critical concepts (scholarship and theory), and lastly, academic fields with their specific histories, practices and agendas.Less

Mass Media and Classics, the Public and Cultural Élitism

Amanda Wrigley

in Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s–1960s

The evaluation of a wealth of evidence in the BBC archive for production processes and audience experience in relation to radio programmes drawing on ancient Greece prompts reflection on broader ... More

The evaluation of a wealth of evidence in the BBC archive for production processes and audience experience in relation to radio programmes drawing on ancient Greece prompts reflection on broader classical reception studies practices and methodological possibilities. A shift away from the Jaussian terms ‘production’ and ‘reception’ is advocated and a model of ‘engagement’ is proposed. This shift necessitates a more inclusive (described as an ‘in the round’) approach as opposed to the practice privileging one or two, albeit important, perspectives (such as the literary, artistic, or political). The latter practice, it is argued, tends to resist the necessary challenge of negotiating and integrating the more untidy and sometimes conflicting histories which can be told from close consultation of a broader range of sources; it may also overlook the significance of the autonomy with which individuals engage with a cultural work.Less

Reception Theory and Meaning

Richard Gaskin

in Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism

This chapter aims to show, with the help of a number of literary examples, that reception theory, which is to be distinguished from reception studies, is false, and that literary works have a ... More

This chapter aims to show, with the help of a number of literary examples, that reception theory, which is to be distinguished from reception studies, is false, and that literary works have a determinate meaning which is established at the time of their production and which is objective in the sense that it is fixed for all time and the same for all readers. The chapter engages with, and rebuts, the arguments of Stanley Fish and E. D. Hirsch that what the latter calls ‘anachronistic meaning’ is a genuine kind of meaning had by works of literature. It thereby defends ‘old’ historicism, as opposed to ‘new’ historicism, which is rejected.Less

Reading Race and Place: Boston Book Clubs and Post-Soul Fiction

Kimberly Chabot Davis

in Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading

This chapter focuses on the reception of two African American “post-soul” novels that deconstruct essentialist ideas about race. Inviting readers to reconsider binary understandings of blackness and ... More

This chapter focuses on the reception of two African American “post-soul” novels that deconstruct essentialist ideas about race. Inviting readers to reconsider binary understandings of blackness and whiteness, Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) focuses on free blacks who own slaves in the antebellum South, while Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) details the coming of age of a mixed-race girl in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter examines how the reading of a racially charged text is influenced by the readers' locality and the communities in which they live and participate. It also compares the conversations of racially mixed book clubs to those with all white or all African American members, and analyzes the connections and disjunctions between empathetic reading and the readers' political lives within a metropolitan area with a long history of racial antagonism.Less

Introduction: Fossil or Root? Anglo-Saxon and the Origin and Descent of English Poetry

Chris Jones

in Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic ... More

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.Less

Oprah, Book Clubs, and the Promise and Limitations of Empathy

Kimberly Chabot Davis

in Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading

This chapter draws distinctions among the reading strategies of white readers in order to shed light on the failures and the political promise of cross-racial empathy. It focuses largely on ... More

This chapter draws distinctions among the reading strategies of white readers in order to shed light on the failures and the political promise of cross-racial empathy. It focuses largely on middle-class white women as they encounter black-authored fiction within book-club settings. In contrast to much of the scholarship on cross-racial sympathy that replicates a monolithic view of whiteness, the chapter emphasizes how multiple identities of gender, class, age, ethnicity, education, and political affiliation work to complicate “white” modes of reading. Given the larger argument that empathy is a key ingredient in the development of anti-racist white identities, this chapter is structured to distinguish among different deployments of empathy and their political consequences.Less