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Circe, the female hero. First-person narrative and power in Madeline Miller’s Circe Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 Valeria Spacciante
This article analyzes Madeline Miller’s Circe in relation to the contemporary trend of women’s mythological retellings of marginalized female characters. Because of Circe’s first-person narrative, Miller’s book has been interpreted and marketed as empowering and feminist; however, Circe’s narrative structure rather reaffirms the ideological assumptions underlying the ‘masculine’ Bildungsroman, where
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The haunting of classics in the Dark Academia aesthetic Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-09 Tori F Lee
This article explores the online aesthetic ‘Dark Academia’ from the perspective of Classical reception. Dark Academia became popular during the COVID-19 era as an internet subculture revolving around bookishness, university culture, the Gothic, and the Classical. From its beginning as a Tumblr fandom around Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), Dark Academia has grown to reach millions of followers
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W. E. B. Du Bois’s universal history in Black Folk Then and Now (1939) Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-06-12 Harriet Fertik
While debates about ‘Eurocentric’ versus ‘Afrocentric’ theories of history have driven previous studies of Du Bois’s writings on ancient Africa, I read his account of African antiquity in Black Folk Then and Now in the context of the moral and educational projects articulated within both Greco-Roman and African American historiography. I pay special attention to conventional ancient views of history
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‘Something Mythic’: The power of shared stories in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-28 Clara Shaw Hardy
Kamila Shamsie’s (2017) novel Home Fire draws on Sophocles’ Antigone for its plot, but neither requires familiarity with, nor explicitly references, the tragedy. This article attempts to build a specific case for the effects of attending to the intertext by focusing on Shamsie’s complex treatment of Antigone’s punishment and its consequences in Sophocles. Reading the novel’s denouement in conversation
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Vernacular classicism and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus: the architectural imaginary of a Danish interwar crematorium Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-21 Troels Myrup Kristensen
This article discusses a crematorium inaugurated in 1923 in the municipal Northern Cemetery (Nordre Kirkegård) of Aarhus as a case of vernacular classicism in interwar Denmark. While earlier works by its architect Sophus Frederik Kühnel (1851–1930) followed National Romantic, Renaissance, and Gothic models, the crematorium stands out because of its crowning feature, a stepped pyramid roof that emulates
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Narrativity and literariness in receptions of Josephus’s teknophagia story Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Yonatan Binyam
In this article, I present an analysis of the narrative discourses and literary elements found in the teknophagia story that originates with Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum and trace the development of those motifs in subsequent Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions of the story. I first outline the reception history of Josephus within medieval Coptic and Ethiopic literary traditions, by way of the
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‘Back from the silence with something to say’: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and silence as classical reception Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Emily Hauser
This article explores the power of silence in the feminist recovery of classical texts to open up engaged spaces for women’s creative reworkings, taking as a case study Lavinia and her reception in Ursula Le Guin’s (2008) novel of the same name. By re-evaluating silence in dialogue with feminist and classical reception scholarship, I argue that Le Guin is able to bring a different angle to the reception
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Introduction A Hellenic Modernism: Greek Theatre and Italian Fascism Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Giovanna Di Martino, Eleftheria Ioannidou, Sara Troiani
The introduction to the special issue explores the central place of Greek theatre within the culture of Italian Fascism. Building on scholarship from the so-called cultural turn in the study of fascism, which variously identified fascism with a form of modernism, it demonstrates that a dialogue between modernism and classicism was fully at work in the performances of ancient drama occurring all over
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Afterword: memory and the past: fascism, spectacle, history Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
The Afterword addresses the efforts of Italian fascists to build an imaginary fascist community through the mythical appropriation of the past. It argues that fascism epitomized in a peculiarly contradictory and destructive manner the moderns’ reaction to what they perceived as the end of an era. The historical division between memory and history, established in the nineteenth century, engulfed the
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Greek theatre, electric lights, and the plumes of locomotives: the quarrel between the Futurists and the Classicists and the Hellenic modernism of Fascism Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Eleftheria Ioannidou
The controversy between the Futurists and the classicists over the Greek theatre of Syracuse remains largely overlooked within the scholarship concerned with the relationship between Futurism and Fascism. The Futurist movement launched a polemic against the staging of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers in 1921, counterposing Greek tragedy to new forms of drama drawing on Futurist performance aesthetics and
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Constructing a Hellenic modernism: Aeschylus at the ancient theatre of Syracuse (1914–30) Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Giovanna Di Martino
This article examines the aesthetic means employed in classical performances produced by the Institute of Ancient Drama (INDA) in Syracuse between 1914 and 1930, with a particular focus on performances of Aeschylus’ tragedies. The first part of this study traces the influences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde movements on the Syracusan project, including the
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Ancient tragedy, yet modern music: musical compositions in the classical performances (1921–39) Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Giovanna Casali
This contribution aims to analyse the role of music in the revival of Greek theatre that characterized twentieth-century Italy. In particular, it explores and compares the music composed for INDA productions between 1921 and 1939. From the beginning of the festival, music occupied a crucial role, thanks to Ettore Romagnoli’s emphasis on the musical component in reviving ancient Greek drama. The years
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Classical dance and Mediterranean imaginaries: Jia Ruskaja in Fascist Italy Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Patrizia Veroli
Russian dancer and film actress Jia Ruskaja (Evgeniya Borisenko, 1902–70) forged a rapidly rising career in Italy as a dancer, teacher and company director during the thirties. The author of La danza come un modo di essere (1927) was a female education reformer, whose Milan dance schools were subsidized by the Fascist Regime. In 1940, she was entrusted with the directorship of the newly founded Royal
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Ettore Romagnoli, rievocatore of ancient Greek drama Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Sara Troiani
The Italian classicist Ettore Romagnoli (1871–938) is mostly remembered as a popularizer of ancient drama through his work as a translator for and artistic director of classical performances at the Greek theatre of Syracuse (1914–27). His theatrical productions were inspired by a programmatic aesthetic approach to the study of classical culture called ‘artistic Hellenism’, which aimed at making the
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‘Dance against the void’: Derek Jarman, dance, queer classical receptions Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Marcus Bell
This article considers three moments from the beginning, middle and end of Derek Jarman’s artistic career: Lindsay Kemp’s opening dance in Sebastiane (1976), Jarman’s words on a performance by Michael Clark in the 1980s, and Jarman’s last film Blue (1993), while holding onto the affective registers of his final diary entry (1994). Considering the ways in which Jarman indexed the ephemeral myth-making
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Medea/Media: a glitchy counterfactual Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Mario Telò, Catherine Conybeare
James Ijames, the winner of a 2022 Pulitzer prize for Fat Ham, loosely based on Hamlet, has just presented a new realization of Medea, Media/Medea, which had its world premiere at Bryn Mawr College and the Community College of Philadelphia in April 2023. This article provides a reading of it, addressing the themes of irony, queer ‘authenticity’, acting, and mothering through the framing of the ‘glitchy
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Forging lesbians: Sappho and The Songs of Bilitis Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Cat Lambert
In Les Chansons de Bilitis (‘The Songs of Bilitis’, 1894), Pierre Louÿs purports to have translated into French for the first time the long-lost Greek poems of Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. Classicists have often heralded Bilitis as a watershed moment for reclaiming the lesbian Sappho from the clutches of homophobic, misogynist philologists. This paper complicates this narrative by reframing Bilitis
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Commemorative Architecture, Periclean Athens and the Polish Revolution of 1791: Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier’s Parthenon-Inspired Temple for Warsaw Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Mikołaj Getka-Kenig
Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier’s design for the Temple of Providence in Warsaw, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s capital, is the earliest known evidence of European fascination with the Parthenon as a model for modern commemorative architecture. However, it was this proposal’s specific political context which makes it especially interesting from the perspective of classical reception studies. It
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Claude McKay’s vagabond classicisms: empire, uplift, and antiquity Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Ben Gregson
This article examines the classicisms of the influential Jamaican writer, Claude McKay. Taking as paradigmatic an allusion to the myth of Laocoön in Banjo, it analyses McKay’s troubling of the classical notion of translatio imperii et studii throughout his work. Consistently rejecting imperium, McKay nevertheless embraced classical studium as a potential source of racial uplift and new creative expression
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Masters of desire: the (re)erotization of the slave’s body in cinematic and television representations of ancient Rome Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Luis Unceta Gómez
The exhibition of the naked and near-naked bodies of enslaved people is a notable feature in cinematic representation of Rome. This article analyses the way in which these bodies are framed erotically and what an examination of this feature can tell us about the cinematic reception of ancient Rome. In this article, particular attention is paid to the erotization of the body of the slave within peplum
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A Feminist Act of Defiance: ‘Iphigenia says no’ by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Liana Giannakopoulou
In ‘Iphigenia says no’, Anghelaki-Rooke provides a critique of the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice that gives the story a distinctively feminine poetic voice designed to subvert the unchallenged authority of myth. Her poem is an impassioned plea for a feminist poetics that gives women a voice and agency, rejecting any form of control or authority over the female mind and body. The choice of Euripides’
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Placing ‘moderns’ in a ‘classic’ series: the case of J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Caterina Domeneghini
This study offers a reappraisal of Everyman’s Library, the mass-market series of world 'classics' launched by the British publisher J. M. Dent & Sons in 1906. The collection’s reliance on the 1842 and 1911 Copyright Acts has fostered a misconception within literary studies: namely, that reprint series were ‘impervious to novelty’. Conversely, I argue that ‘liveliness’ and ‘timeliness’—being in line
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‘Meteorology’ and ‘meteors’ across centuries: a short history of two problematic terms Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-23 Matěj Novotný, Barbora Kocánová, Miloslav Müller
The article is dedicated to meaning variations and transformations in the terms meteorology and meteor from antiquity to the present. It is argued that the use of the word meteor as a noun denoting a specific meteorological phenomenon only became established in the Renaissance, as the Greek adjective μετέωρος ‘raised, aloft’ in the substantivized neuter form was originally used in the plural to denote
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Shakespeare and Plautus: exploring metrical influence Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Alexander Christensen
Scholars have recognized for some time that Shakespeare’s early comedies drew much from Plautine comedy. Although these points of influence have long been established, discussion of Plautus’ influence on Shakespeare has not often moved beyond them to broader questions of whether he had any influence over Shakespeare’s tragedies, over his later career in general, or over more specific techniques of
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The rape-pregnancy plots of Roman comedy and their reception in nineteenth-century Greece: the case of The Pot of Basil by Antonios Matesis Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Christopher Jotischky
Plots in which a woman is raped and left pregnant are common in Roman comedy, but the cultural meaning of unwanted pregnancy and its relationship to women’s personal freedoms and bodily autonomy varies across reception contexts. Antonios Matesis (1794–1875) translated Terence’s Hecyra into vernacular Greek in the 1820s before going on to compose a comedy of his own, The Pot of Basil, which is influenced
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In Search of Lost Haim: Homer and Heimat in the Dialectic of Enlightenment Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 David Youd
In this essay, I return to Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to suggest that Odysseus’s crew comes to figure ‘the Jew’ as a representative of nature in the antisemitic Imaginary—the nature that enlightenment continues to repress. Escape from enlightenment’s deadlock will depend on the ‘remembrance’ of that nature, an operation itself considered ‘Jewish’
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Henrik Ibsen, Emperor Julian, and the crisis of faith in modernity Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Brad Boswell, Matthew R Crawford, Anna Stavrakopoulou
Although it is one of his lesser known and performed plays, Henrik Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his Hovedverk—his ‘main’ or ‘pivotal’ work—in which he finally presented his positive worldview. It remains comparatively little studied in scholarship, though one scholar has recently argued that it is the key to unlocking his entire corpus. The present study builds upon past scholarship
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Between Bacchae and Bahanalii—balkanizing classical reception Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Nebojša Todorović
This article sets Euripides’ Bacchae in dialogue with Goran Stefanovski’s Bahanalii, a play that was performed in the immediate aftermath of Yugoslavia’s break-up. Contrapuntal reading shows how the two plays problematize conservative epistemologies by imagining their borderlands as privileged sites of knowledge production. Euripides’ Bacchae opens with a Dionysus who arrives on stage from a faraway
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‘If Clodia despised Catullus, you can very well, Dionysus, despise Ariadne’: classical receptions and Roman elegy in Hilda Hilst’s Discontinuous and Remote Ode for Flute and Oboe. From Ariadne to Dionysus (1969) Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-04 Fernando Gorab Leme
After her depiction in Catullus 64, Ariadne became a model for the relicta, the abandoned woman. The tapestry that ornamented the wedding of Peleus and Thetis told exactly of her dismay and anger upon learning that Theseus left her. As far as the myth goes, following her abandonment, Dionysus took her as a wife. Modernist Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) revisits this portion of the tale in
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The Humed Serpent: Lucian, miracles, enlightenment, and empire Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Martin Devecka
In his essay ‘Of Miracles’, published separately and as the final chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume enlists Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet as evidence for his claim that miracle narratives first take root among gullible rural populations before spreading to cultured city-dwelling elites. This essay reads Lucian’s Alexander and On the Death of Peregrinus against
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Sophia’s double: photography, archaeology, and modern Greece Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-03 Jennifer M S Stager
In the context of the entangled productions of scientific archaeology, photographic technologies, and the Greek nation-state, this article analyses the ancient Greek idea of the eidōlon (image, phantom, double) as a paradigm for photography. Sophia Engastromenou Schliemann presented herself for the camera as Helen of Troy and mobilized an ancient textual debate about Helen and her double and the Trojan
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Prometheus in Russia: from Revolution to Dissidence Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Ekaterina But
This essay examines the development of the image of Prometheus as a symbol of the revolutionary in Russia and the Soviet Union. After providing a historical overview of pre-Soviet and early-Soviet receptions of Prometheus’ image in Alexander Scriabin’s symphony Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (Prometei: Poema Ognia, 1908–10) and in the unfinished production of the ancient Greek tragic trilogy at the Moscow
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The Puzzle Of Valerii Briusov’s Aeneid Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Zara Martirosova Torlone
Abstract The translation of the Aeneid by a leading Symbolist poet Valerii Briusov, on which he worked most of his life, failed to gain favor with Russian readers because of its literalism. Combining various theoretical approaches with a close analysis of the text this essay explores why Briusov’s translation failed in the context of the cultural and aesthetic demands of the era in which it was composed
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Mataioponēmata: the politics of failure in translating the Aeneid in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greece Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Sophia Papaioannou
Abstract The composition of translations of Classical texts in the nineteenth-century Greek state was a complex issue entwined with politics, ideology, and the cultural identity of the new nation that sought to construct its identity by looking back towards its glorious Classical Greek past. It is, moreover, an issue tied to the so-called ‘language question’, the ardent debate on the type of the national
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Introduction: what is failure in translation? Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-20 Susanna Braund,Zara Martirosova Torlone
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Correction to: Shakespeare’s suppliants: the ‘rotten custom’ of ancient asylum seeking in Coriolanus Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-04 Christina Wald
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Graecia Belgica: writing Ancient Greek in the early modern Low Countries Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-03-17 Han Lamers,Raf Van Rooy
Abstract The early modern Low Countries formed a multilingual region where Latin and several vernaculars lived in symbiosis. It is often forgotten, however, that Ancient Greek was also cultivated among the cultural and intellectual elite, so intensely that a vast corpus of Greek texts was produced in this region. This article offers a first exploration of the reasons behind this cultural phenomenon
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‘This is how I explain the universality of Xenophon’: Machado de Assis, Brazilian Republic and the Cyropaedia Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Lucia Sano
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), considered by many the greatest Brazilian author, was once called a Greek of the golden days due in part to his frequent use of classical allusions. This article analyses the reception of Xenophon's Cyropaedia in his novel Esau and Jacob (1904). Its narrator quotes the Greek author’s reflection on the instability of all political regimes and his conclusion
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Oedipus at Dover Cliff: Early Modern Receptions of Seneca’s Phoenissae Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Caroline Engelmayer
Major accounts of Renaissance Senecanism argue that tragic protagonists in Seneca and his early modern imitators draw on overwhelming fury to achieve autarkic selfhood. Yet not all plays follow this mould: unlike the better-known Thyestes and Medea, Seneca’s Phoenissae locates tragic identity in the self-conscious rejection of a sudden resolution to violent strife. Oedipus, the play’s protagonist,
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Procne in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-10 Cullhed S.
AbstractSethe Suggs, the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, is often compared to Medea. The same analogy with the Colchian princess was often made by contemporaries in relation to Margaret Garner, the historical person on whose life the novel is loosely based. An enslaved African-American woman in the mid-nineteenth century, Garner killed her own daughter after being found by her former
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Longing For Home: A Complex Emotion in Homer’s Odyssey and Derek Walcott’s Omeros Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2022-01-13 Karen Possingham
Using recent affect theories, this article focuses on the role that emotion plays in new receptions of ancient texts, in this case the emotion of longing for home — for the place, as well as for the people — as we find it in the Homeric epics and in the modern Caribbean world of Derek Walcott. Longing for home in the Odyssey is portrayed as a contradictory emotion comprising both place attachment and
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Constructing the Classical Past: the Role of Landscape in Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-12-20 Dawn L Hollis
This article examines the works of Christopher Wordsworth (1807–85), who has hitherto been neglected as an important and intriguing figure in the history of travel writing on Greece. His texts, which invite readers to ‘view’ the country from mountain-tops and to imagine its caves and quarries filled with ancient figures, highlight the importance of landscape as a frame for studying classical reception
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Smash the thing: William Kentridge, classical antiquity, and his Refusal of Time in O Sentimental Machine Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-12-14 Samuel Agbamu
This article examines a 2018 exhibition of William Kentridge’s work, entitled O Sentimental Machine, at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt. This exhibition placed the South African artist’s work in confrontation with the museum’s collections, which offer an overview of sculpture from antiquity to early modernity. The exhibition draws together themes explored in Kentridge’s sustained engagement
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Carthaginians Beyond the Ocean: Comparison, Justification, and Inversion in the Hypothesis of the Carthaginian Discovery of America Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-12-03 Pamina Fernández Camacho
After the American continent was discovered, Spanish intellectuals exerted their ingenuity in an attempt to explain the existence of those hitherto unknown territories, and engaged in controversies about the moral and legal right to exploit them. The use of classical sources as authorities was common in those debates. In this article, we focus on the mention by Ps.-Aristotle and Diodorus of an island
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On Criticising The Knox Bible Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-11-05 Andrew J Horne
Ronald Knox’s 1955 translation of the Latin Vulgate met with an overall lackluster reception. Yet critics were never able to agree on what was wrong, or even what the translation was like. Some found Knox modern, others old-fashioned. Some criticised him for departing from the Challoner Douay-Rheims, others for not translating the Hebrew and Greek. Through collation and close reading of reviews, this
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Hellenism, philhellenism and classical reception: commemorating the 1821 revolution Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Jennifer Wallace,Vassilis Lambropoulos
Abstract The Greek Revolution of 1821–1829 mobilized the ideas of classical reception and Philhellenism developed over the previous century to appeal for international support for the war. These complicated ideas influenced the ways both Greeks and non-Greeks thought about the nation, its political character, language, literature, history, culture and landscape. How the revolution and post-revolutionary
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Classical Absences (1896–2017) Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-09-21 Laura Jansen
When we consider classical receptions in terms of presences, we often think of how antiquity materializes visibly and/or substantially in the fabric of our histories, whether as physical remains or concrete traditions. Yet the search for the classical as a solid, conspicuous phenomenon reveals only one side of the fascinating story of how we can conceive its status and circulation across space and
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Shakespeare’s suppliants: the ‘rotten custom’ of ancient asylum seeking in Coriolanus Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-09-10 Wald C.
AbstractLooking back to the early modern period from the current immigration crisis, this article reads Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus as a tragedy of displacement and asylum seeking. It argues that just like theatrical productions today, Shakespeare might have harked back to ancient Greek tragedy as a cultural resource for coming to terms with the challenges of immigration. It traces the possible
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An Israeli–Palestinian Hecuba: Hanoch Levin’s Anti-Tragedy Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Abigail Akavia
The Lost Women of Troy by Hanoch Levin, Israel’s foremost playwright of the twentieth century, is an adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women and Hecuba. Staged in Tel Aviv in 1984 during the First Lebanon War, Lost Women focuses on the bereavement and humiliation of Hecuba. Levin reconfigures this character to reflect mothers on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Through a subversion of
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The music of Iannis Xenakis’ estranged Kassandra Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-08-30 Pillinger E.
AbstractIannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was a radically innovative composer. Violently persecuted for his leftist activism in the Greek Civil War that followed the Second World War, he fled Greece to live the rest of his life in Paris. One of the most explicit expressions of his resultant feelings of trauma, guilt, and displacement can be found in the vocal piece he called Kassandra (1987). This demanding
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Erratum to: Plautus goes USA: the adaptation of Rudens by the Ladies’ Literary Society of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1884 Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-08-22 Beine J.
Classical Receptions Journal doi:10.1093/crj/clab004
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Plautus goes USA: the adaptation of Rudens by the Ladies’ Literary Society of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1884 Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-08-22 Beine J.
AbstractThis article investigates the first documented performance of a Plautine comedy in Latin in the USA. In 1884, The Ladies’ Literary Society of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, staged Plautus’ Rudens in Latin with an all-female cast. This performance offers a unique opportunity to analyse the Society’s understanding and interpretation of Plautus’ play as well as its adaptation for
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The ‘Antipoet of the Greeks’, or, how Euripides became a modernist Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-08-05 Gabriel K.
AbstractThis essay pursues the history of the widespread and influential claim that the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides anticipates the social concerns of modernity and the formal strategies of modernism. The claim originated at the same time as the development of the canon of German tragic criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Building on but importantly altering the ancient criticism
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A good gay Odyssey: Andrew Sean Greer’s Less Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-07-03 Fletcher J.
AbstractAndrew Sean Greer’s comedic novel Less is a self-reflexive version of the Odyssey, featuring a gay love story in which the narrator and his subject merge to produce a postmodern homophrosyne that recapitulates the like-mindedness of Odysseus and Penelope. Although the novel makes explicit allusions to specific events and characters of the Homeric epic, its most significant intertextuality is
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Introduction: Poetics as Classical Reception Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 Vladimir Brljak, Micha Lazarus
‘Artes poeticae’: Formations and Transformations, 1500–1650 gathers path-breaking new work on the literary criticism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and Latin America, a domain of literary and intellectual history which represents one of the richest and most enduring strains of the classical heritage in this period.
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The Poetics of Comedy in Jacques Peletier Du Mans’s Art poëtique (1555) Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 Lucy Rayfield
This article looks at Jacques Peletier du Mans’s (1555) rhetorical and poetic treatise, Art poëtique, with a focus on his theory on comedy. It draws comparisons with Peletier’s 1541 literary treatise, which was the first translation into French of Horace’s Ars Poetica. In his 1555 treatise, Peletier developed Horace’s position on comedy into his own original theory, moulding the classical model to
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The Other Arena: Poetics Goes Global in the Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1650+ Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 Maya Feile Tomes
The period 1500–1650 is the period during which Europe’s poetic traditions — of ultimately Greco-Roman (i.e. Mediterranean Basin) origin — first came to be systematically exported outside the strictly European geographical sphere: the new contexts offered by the Portuguese- and especially Spanish-controlled zones of the rapidly expanding Iberian imperial world is where this first took place. This chapter
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Marvels and Commonplaces in the Elizabethan Anthologies Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 Ted Tregear
In a brief essay on Cato the Younger, Montaigne draws together five excerpts from Latin verse in Cato's honour; by the time he returned to the essay in his final years, those excerpts elicited some of the author's richest remarks on poetry and the poetic sublime. This essay argues that the anthology, in its various shapes and forms, offered early modern readers a way of doing literary criticism. Taking
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Parallel Lives: Shakespeare and the Debate Over Emotional Involvement Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 James Hall
The decades around 1600 saw a Europe-wide vogue for artists, writers, orators, and actors to fully identify with their sitters, subjects, or characters, the practice often being justified with the Horatian dictum, ‘If you want me to cry, mourn first yourself’ (Russell and Winterbottom 1972: 282 [Ars 101]). Among the more extreme manifestations are the young sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who in 1617
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Exit Pursued by Horace: Bears, Shakespeare, and the Classical Tradition Classical Receptions Journal (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 Aaron J Kachuck
This article puts the bear back in Horace, demonstrating the role bears have played from antiquity through the Renaissance as the great disruptor of the classical literary artefact, simplex et unum. The first section of the article treats bear’s place in ancient poetics. The second section exposes its role in Horace’s corpus, demonstrating how it instantiates both historical interpretive conflicts