Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Laughing with Medusa explores a series of inter-linking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the center of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commissioned work of fiction, "Iphigeneia's Wedding," by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

Contemporary translation studies have explored translation not as a means of recovering a source text, but as a process of interpretation and production of literary meaning and value. Translation and the Classic uses this idea to discuss the relationship between translation and the classic text. It proposes a framework in which 'the classic' figures less as an autonomous entity than as the result of the interplay between source text and translation practice and examines the consequences of this hypothesis for questioning established definitions of the classic: how does translation mediate the social, political and national uses of 'the classics' in the contemporary global context of changing canons and traditions? The volume contains a total of eighteen original essays, plus an introduction, written by scholars working in classics and classical reception, translation studies, literary theory, comparative literature, theatre and performance studies, history and philosophy and makes a potent contribution to pressing debates in all of these areas.

Laughing with Medusa explores a series of interlinking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the centre of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commisssioned work of fiction, Iphigeneia's Wedding', by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

Since Freud published the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and utilized Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to work through his developing ideas about the psycho-sexual development of children, it has been virtually impossible to think about psychoanalysis without reference to classical myth. Myth has the capacity to transcend the context of any particular retelling, continuing to transform our understanding of the present. Throughout the twentieth century, experts on the ancient world have turned to the insights of psychoanalytic criticism to supplement and inform their readings of classical myth and literature.
This volume examines the inter-relationship of classical myth and psychoanalysis from the generation before Freud to the present day, engaging with debates about the role of classical myth in modernity, the importance of psychoanalytic ideas for cultural critique, and its ongoing relevance to ways of conceiving the self. The chapters trace the historical roots of terms in everyday usage, such as narcissism and the phallic symbol, in the reception of Classical Greece, and cover a variety of both classical and psychoanalytic texts.