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 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.

Throughout his career, Derek Walcott turned to the literature and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. His book-length poem recasting the epics of Homer, Virgil and Dante in St Lucia is best-known in this regard, yet Omeros is only the pinnacle of a lengthy and lively dialogue that Walcott developed between the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Caribbean. Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean explores how, in developing that discourse between ancient and modern, between Europe and the Caribbean, Walcott refuted the suggestion that to engage with literature from elsewhere was to lack originality; instead, he asserted a place for Caribbean art in a global, transhistorical canon. Drawing on Walcott’s own theoretical concerns, this book explores his engagement with Graeco-Roman antiquity from three key perspectives. Firstly, that a perception of time as linear must be coupled with an understanding of it as simultaneous, thereby doing away with the oppressive power of history and confirming the ‘New World’ on a par with the ‘Old’. Secondly, that syncretism lies at the heart of Caribbean life and art, with influences from Africa, Asia, and Europe constituting key parts of Caribbean identity alongside its indigenous cultures. Thirdly, that Caribbean literature creates the world anew without erasing the past. With these three postcolonial conceptions at the heart of his engagement with ancient Greece and Rome, Walcott revealed the reasons why classical reception has been a rich facet of Caribbean artistry.

A pathbreaking study of the role played by ancient Greek and Roman sources and voices in the struggle to abolish transatlantic slavery and in representations of that struggle in the twentieth century. Thirteen essays by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from three continents, led by the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway University of London, ask how both critics and defenders of slavery in media ranging from parliamentary speeches to poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema have summoned the ghosts of the ancient Spartans, Homer, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Pliny, Spartacus, and Prometheus to support their arguments.