Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism and then a rich field for creating cultural identities that blend the old and the new. Nobel prize-winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by international scholars, who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. "Remaking the Classics" also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts. The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.

Never have there been so many different types of translations of Greek and Latin literature into English. Most people experience Homer and Greek tragedy for the first time through translations. New versions of Vergil and Ovid have become best sellers. This book examines the literary and cultural environment underlying the various kinds of translation - from 'faithful' and 'equivalent' through 'imitation' to 'adaptation' and 'version' - discussing the extent to which translations have been regarded as creative work in their own right and their impact in the work of modern writers such as Harrison, Heaney, Hughes and Walcott. Key themes include the challenge presented by translations to conventional interpretations of the classical canon; the implications of translating across genres - for example in the staging of epic; and the role of translations in twentieth-century conflicts. Lorna Hardwick suggests that translations from Greek and Latin literature are catalysts in the refiguring of both poetic and political awareness and that in transplanting myths and metaphors into disparate cultures, translations energise new senses of cultural identity.