Reception and the classics
An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition
This collection brings together leading experts in a number of fields of the humanities to offer a new perspective on the classical tradition. Drawing on reception studies, philology, and early modern studies, the essays explore the interaction between literary criticism and the multiple cultural contexts in which texts were produced, discovered, appropriated, and translated. The intersection of Realpolitik and textual criticism, poetic and musical aesthetics, and authority and self-fashioning all come under scrutiny. The canonical Latin writers and their subsequent reception form the backbone of the volume, with a focus on the European Renaissance. It thus marks a reconnection between classical and early modern studies and the concomitant rapprochement of philological and cultural historical approaches to texts and other works of art. This book will be of interest to scholars in Classics, Renaissance studies, comparative literature, English, Italian, and art history.
William Brockliss is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Brigham Young University. He has recently completed a dissertation on the relationship between the metaphorical associations of flowers in Homeric poetry and the characteristics of flora in the Greek natural environment. In the future, he intends to develop his studies of metaphoricity by exploring the contrasting treatments of everyday metaphor in Greek poetry and philosophy.
Pramit Chaudhuri is Assistant Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College. He specializes in the Latin poetry of the early Roman empire, set within a broader study of classical epic and tragedy. His current work explores literary depictions of theomachy (conflicts between humans and gods) and their mediation of issues such as religious conflict, philosophical iconoclasm, political struggle, and poetic rivalry. He also studies the reception of classical antiquity in early modern epic and tragedy and in Renaissance art.
Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in the political culture and historiography of the Roman republic, with a particular focus on the conjunction of literary technique and historical subject matter. Her current work includes a book-length study of the construction and experience of political authority in the republic, focusing especially on Livy and Cicero. She has also published on intertextuality and source criticism in Livy.
Katherine Wasdin is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Rutgers University. She works on Latin poetry, with an emphasis on minor and occasional genres. Her current project explores the dialogue between Greek and Latin erotic and nuptial verse showing how and why these types of poetry borrow from each other to express ideas of union, desire, and community in authors such as Sappho, Catullus, the Latin love elegists, and Claudian. She also has interests in Archaic Greek poetry, the ancient novel, and the reception of antiquity in contemporary literature.
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Cambridge University Press 2012
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First published 2012
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Reception and the classics / edited for the Department of Classics by William Brockliss [et al.].
p. cm. (Yale classical studies ; v. 36)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-76432-2 (hardback)
1. Classicism Congresses. 2. Reader-response criticism Congresses. 3. Literature Congresses. 4. Music Congresses. 5. Motion pictures Congresses. I. Brockliss, William. II. Reception and the classics (2007 : Yale University) III. Title. IV. Series.
PN56.C6R43 2011
880.09 dc23 2011033044
ISBN 978-0-521-76432-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Notes on contributors
Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He has written widely on Renaissance literature and its classical background. His publications include The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (1978), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (1985), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), and The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2: 15501660 (forthcoming), co-edited with Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie.
Joseph Farrell is Professor of Classical Studies and Joseph B. Glossberg Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Latin literature, especially poetry, and the culture of the Republican and Augustan periods. His publications include Vergil's Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic (1991), Latin Language and Latin Culture (2001), and A Companion to Vergil's Aeneid and its Tradition (2010), co-edited with Michael C. J. Putnam.
Robert A. Kaster is Professor of Classics and Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin at Princeton University. He has written mainly in the areas of Roman rhetoric, the history of ancient education, and Roman ethics. His books include Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (1988), Suetonius: De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (1995), Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (2005), and editions, translations, and commentaries of various Latin authors, including most recently Seneca and Macrobius.
Giuseppe Mazzotta is Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian at Yale University. He has written a number of essays about every century of Italian literary history. His books include Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (1979), The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron (1986), Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (1993); The Worlds of Petrarch (1993); The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1998), and Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (2001).
