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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.
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