{"title":"Classical Receptions In Twentieth-Century Writing","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore 20th-century literature through the lens of classical reception. Discover how ancient myths, themes and styles are reimagined in modern novels. A fascinating collection for lovers of literary history and innovation.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"tony-harrison-book-edith-hall-9781474299336","title":"Tony Harrison","description":"This is the first book-length study of the classicism of Tony Harrison, one of the most important contemporary poets in England and the world. It argues that his unique and politically radical classicism is inextricable from his core notion that poetry should be a public property in which communal problems are shared and crystallised, and that the poet has a responsibility to speak in a public voice about collective and political concerns. Enriched by Edith Hall’s longstanding friendship with Harrison and involvement with his most recent drama, inspired by Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, it also asserts that his greatest innovations in both form and style have been direct results of his intense engagements with individual works of ancient literature and his belief that the ancient Greek poetic imagination was inherently radical.  Tony Harrison's large body of work, for which he has won several major and international prizes, and which features on the UK National Curriculum, ranges widely across long and short poems, plays, translations and film poems. Having studied Classics at Grammar School and University and having translated ancient poets from Aeschylus to Martial and Palladas, Harrison has been immersed in the myths, history, literary forms and authorial voices of Mediterranean antiquity for his entire working life and his classical interests are reflected in every poetic genre he has essayed, from epigrams and sonnets to original stage plays, translations of Greek drama and Racine, to his experimental and harrowing film poems, where he has pioneered the welding of tightly cut video materials to tightly phrased verse forms. 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On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life.   This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. 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Having studied Classics at Grammar School and University and having translated ancient poets from Aeschylus to Martial and Palladas, Harrison has been immersed in the myths, history, literary forms and authorial voices of Mediterranean antiquity for his entire working life and his classical interests are reflected in every poetic genre he has essayed, from epigrams and sonnets to original stage plays, translations of Greek drama and Racine, to his experimental and harrowing film poems, where he has pioneered the welding of tightly cut video materials to tightly phrased verse forms. This volume explores the full breadth of his oeuvre, offering an insightful new perspective on a writer who has played an important part in shaping our contemporary literary landscape.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50698192584977,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50698195992849,"sku":"NGR9781350194588","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52402835947793,"sku":"NLS9781350194588","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1350194581.jpg?v=1751465747"},{"product_id":"kathleen-raine-book-jenny-messenger-9781350260542","title":"Kathleen Raine","description":"For the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine, ancient texts were not obsolete, but vital handbooks for reading reality. Drawing on Graeco-Roman philosophy alongside modernist receptions of the ancient world, this book is the first study of her engagement with classical antiquity. Raine’s interpretation of the classical past not only informed her literary work, but also gave her a compelling perspective, which located consciousness as the basis of reality. This way of seeing the world, traceable from antiquity to the present day via the ‘perennial philosophy’, claimed little distinction between inner self and outer world, and stressed the interconnectedness of all beings.  Jenny Messenger explores Raine’s use of Graeco-Roman philosophy as source texts for understanding consciousness, articulated throughout her poetry, scholarship and autobiographical writing. Raine believed there were multiple planes of consciousness, across which symbolic poetry and prose could operate to reach the highest levels of being. 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Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler’s writing. It shows how Butler’s mode of reading tragedy—and, crucially, reading tragically—offers a distinctive ethico-political response to the harrowing dilemmas of our current moment.  Deeply committed both to critical theory and political activism, Judith Butler is one of the most influential intellectuals today. Their ideas have touched the lives of many people, both readers and those who have never heard Butler’s name. 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Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce’s modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce’s fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new.    This study tracks Joyce’s sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. 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Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce’s modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce’s fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new.    This study tracks Joyce’s sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. 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Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics.  Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many \"Greek\" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52587983274257,"sku":"NLS9781474277822","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781474277822.jpg?v=1761057321"},{"product_id":"j-r-r-tolkien-s-utopianism-and-the-classics-book-hamish-williams-9781350241466","title":"J.R.R. Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics","description":"This book opens up new perspectives on the English fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, arguing that he was an influential thinker of utopianism in 20th-century fiction and that his scrutiny of utopias can be assessed through his dialogue with antiquity. 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This study then explores how Tolkien’s use of the classical past can help us to align classical and utopian studies, and thus to reflect on the ranges and limits of utopianism in classical literature and thought.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52655394324753,"sku":"NLS9781350241466","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781350241466.jpg?v=1762220373"},{"product_id":"fellinis-eternal-rome-book-alessandro-carrera-9781474297615","title":"Fellini’s Eternal Rome","description":"*** Winner of the2019 Flaiano Prize in the category Italian Studies ***  In Fellini’s Eternal Rome, Alessandro Carrera explores the co-existence and conflict of paganism and Christianity in the works of Federico Fellini. By combining source analysis, cultural history and jargon-free psychoanalytic film theory, Carrera introduces the reader to a new appreciation of Fellini’s work.   Life-affirming Franciscanism and repressive Counter-Reformation dogmatism live side by side in Fellini’s films, although he clearly tends toward the former and resents the latter. The fascination with pre-Christian Rome shines through La Dolce Vita and finds its culmination in Fellini-Satyricon, the most audacious attempt to imagine what the West would be if Christianity had never replaced classical Rome. Minimal clues point toward a careful, extremely subtle use of classical texts and motifs.   Fellini’s interest in the classics culminates in Olympus, a treatment of Hesiod’s Theogony for a never-realized TV miniseries on Greek mythology, here introduced for the first time to an English-speaking readership. Fellini’s recurrent dream of the Mediterranean Goddess is shaped by the phantasmatic projection of paganism that Christianity created as its convenient Other. His characters long for a “maternal space” where they will be protected from mortality and left free to roam. Yet Fellini shows how such maternal space constantly fails, not because the Church has erased it, but because the utopia of unlimited enjoyment is a self-defeating fantasy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52658820841745,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52658821923089,"sku":"NLS9781474297615","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781474297615.jpg?v=1762261560"},{"product_id":"reading-greek-tragedy-with-judith-butler-book-mario-tel-9781350323384","title":"Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler","description":"Considering Butler’s “tragic trilogy”—a set of interventions on Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Aeschylus’s Eumenides—this book seeks to understand not just how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy, but also how tragedy shapes Butler’s thinking, even when their gaze is directed elsewhere. Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler’s writing. It shows how Butler’s mode of reading tragedy—and, crucially, reading tragically—offers a distinctive ethico-political response to the harrowing dilemmas of our current moment.  Deeply committed both to critical theory and political activism, Judith Butler is one of the most influential intellectuals today. Their ideas have touched the lives of many people, both readers and those who have never heard Butler’s name. 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Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka’s writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka’s prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka’s critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history.  Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka’s authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa’s ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka’s notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. 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Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life.   This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. 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Life-affirming Franciscanism and repressive Counter-Reformation dogmatism live side by side in Fellini’s films, although he clearly tends toward the former and resents the latter. The fascination with pre-Christian Rome shines through La Dolce Vita and finds its culmination in Fellini-Satyricon, the most audacious attempt to imagine what the West would be if Christianity had never replaced classical Rome. Minimal clues point toward a careful, extremely subtle use of classical texts and motifs.   Fellini’s interest in the classics culminates in Olympus, a treatment of Hesiod’s Theogony for a never-realized TV miniseries on Greek mythology, here introduced for the first time to an English-speaking readership. Fellini’s recurrent dream of the Mediterranean Goddess is shaped by the phantasmatic projection of paganism that Christianity created as its convenient Other. His characters long for a “maternal space” where they will be protected from mortality and left free to roam. 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The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka’s writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka’s prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka’s critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history.  Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka’s authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. 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