Edith Hall

Justine McConnell

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns. Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand's foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989

An exploration of the diverse uses and abuses of Greek myth in fiction internationally since 1989.

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction Since 1989

Richard Alston

"Originating in a conference organised in 2007 by the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, University of London, and held at the British Library ... this accessible volume offers a pathbreaking study of the role played by the interpreters of ancient Greek and roman texts in the debates over the abolition of slavery. Focusing on Britain, North America, the Caribbean, and South Africa from the late 17th century, the essays examine the arguments of critics and defenders of slavery and legacy of slavery, in later periods." --Book jacket.

From Hobbes to Hollywood

Ancient Slavery and Abolition

Fiona Macintosh

Performing Epic or Telling Tales takes the new millennium as a starting point for an exploration of the turn to narrative in twenty-first-century theatre, which is often also a turn to Graeco-Roman epic. However, the dominant focus of the volume is less on 'what' the recent epic turn in the theatre consists of than 'why' it seems to be so prevalent: this turn is explained with reference not only to the translation and scholarly histories of the epics, but also to earlier performance traditions and, notably, to recent theoretical debates relating to text-based 'drama' and performance based 'theatre'. What is perhaps most remarkable about this epic turn is not simply the sheer number of outstanding performances that it has produced; it is also that recent practice appears to have outstripped much theoretical discussion about theatre. In chapters ranging from spoken word performances to ballet, from the use of machines and technology to performances that make space for voices occluded by the ancient epics, Performing Epic or Telling Tales seeks to contextualize and explain the 'narrative'/storytelling (re-)turn in recent live performances - a turn that regularly entails engagement with ancient Graeco-Roman epics, which have long provided poets, playwrights, artists, and theatre makers with a storehouse of rich, often perceived as 'raw', material. Refigured and refracted for the modern era, the epics of ancient Greece and Rome are found to be particularly revealing, and particularly 'telling' of the contemporary wider cultural sphere.

Performing Epic Or Telling Tales

This book explores works from Africa and the African diaspora which respond to the Homeric Odyssey. As a founding text of the Western canon, and as a homecoming trope and quest for identity, the Odyssey has inspired writers who are simultaneously striving against and appropriating the very forms which had been used to oppress them.

The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora Since 1939

Black Odysseys

Stephen Harrison

Claire Kenward

Greek and Roman epic poetry has always provided creative artists in the modern world with a rich storehouse of themes. Tim Supple and Simon Reade's 1999 stage adaptation of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid for the RSC heralded a new lease of life for receptions of the genre, and it now routinely provides raw material for the performance repertoire of both major cultural institutions and emergent, experimental theatre companies. This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.

Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

Epic Performances from the Middle Ages Into the Twenty-First Century

Patrice Rankine

Kathryn Bosher

The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas is the first edited collection to discuss the performance of Greek drama across the continents and archipelagos of the Americas from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. The study and interpretation of the classics have never been restricted by geographical or linguistic boundaries but, in the case of the Americas, long colonial histories have often imposed such boundaries arbitrarily. This volume tracks networks across continents and oceans and uncovers the ways in which the shared histories and practices in the performance arts in the Americas have routinely defied national boundaries. With contributions from classicists, Latin American specialists, theatre and performance theorists, and historians, the Handbook also includes interviews with key writers, including Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Charles Mee, and Anne Carson, and leading theatre directors such as Peter Sellars, Carey Perloff, Héctor Daniel-Levy, and Heron Coelho. This richly illustrated volume seeks to define the complex contours of the reception of Greek drama in the Americas, and to articulate how these different engagements - at local, national, or trans-continental levels, as well as across borders - have been distinct both from each other, and from those of Europe and Asia.

Justine McConnell

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