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This introductory chapter discusses briefly the history of the study of Egyptian literature, highlighting how broader developments in the theory of literature have come to be applied within Egyptology, and outlining the significant interpretative issues that still remain. This is particularly acute when studying a civilisation such as Ancient Egypt, with an only fragmentarily preserved literate culture, and no continuous tradition of reception to condition modern engagement with the ancient texts. The chapter reviews the approaches taken by contributors to the volume, and evaluates how they relate to recent developments in the application of theoretically informed approaches to Egyptian texts. The range of topics covered demonstrates the vitality and diversity of current Egyptological engagement with Ancient Egyptian texts.

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.

While language conveys particular ideological perspectives on the world and those perspectives may be unpacked through close textual analysis, of equal importance is the ideology of the text’s recipient since that ideological predisposition provides an important lens through which those texts are received and interpreted. This chapter focuses on how citizens who are not on the media stage understand America’s struggle against terrorism and recontextualize the language of the narrative as they interact with each other. It examines focus group data from discussions held with politically involved college students who attended school in the western United States. The aim is to understand how these students receive and reshape the discourse of the ‘war on terror’ that is in social circulation.