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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.
Examining the profusion of ways in which the arts, culture, and thought of Greece and Rome have been transmitted, interpreted, adapted and used, A Companion to Classical Receptions explores the impact of this phenomenon on both ancient and later societies. Provides a comprehensive introduction and overview of classical reception - the interpretation of classical art, culture, and thought in later centuries, and the fastest growing area in classics Brings together 34 essays by an international group of contributors focused on ancient and modern reception concepts and practices Combines close readings of key receptions with wider contextualization and discussion Explores the impact of Greek and Roman culture worldwide, including crucial new areas in Arabic literature, South African drama, the history of photography, and contemporary ethics
A collection of essays by a team of distinguished international contributors concerned with how Classic - mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese - texts become present in later cultures; how they are passed on, received and affect over time and space, and how they resonate in the modern.
Praise for Unrepentant ... : "For open-minded religious leaders, there are nuggets of enlightenment in this ecumenical array."--Publishers Weekly "Surprisingly readable as well as informative." - San Francisco Chronicle "A significant body of knowledge." - Theology Today "Publishers' catalogues are full of books on the church's view of homosexuality; Comstock here offers gay views of the church. Given the often hostile environment, he asks why gay people stay in religious institutions. Using social scientific methods, he summarizes thirty-six surveys of gay attitudes toward religious communities, including Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Native American traditions. He adds data from his survey...
This book investigates the potential purpose of recurrent communication images in the poetry of Derek Walcott. The recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, Walcott is one of the most important postcolonial poets of the 20th century. His poetry delves into the dynamics of Caribbean marginalization and seeks to safeguard the paradigms characteristic of his island home. Several major studies have examined themes in his poetry but the images of communication in his poetics have not been explored. This book examines Walcott's poetry expressions that the poet brings into play in order to demonstrate the relevance of the Caribbean in the contemporary world--firstly through a study of co...
Paidea, the yearning for, and display of knowledge, reached its height as a cultural concept in the works of the Second Sophistic, an elite literary and philosophical movement seeking to ape the style and achievements of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. A crucial element in the display of paidea was an ability to mix the witty and playful with the serious and instructive. The Second Sophistic is known as a Greek phenomenon, but these essays ask how the Latin author Apuleius fitted into this framework, and created a distinctively latin expression of paidea, focusing on the elements of playfulness at its heart.
Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a compendious, timely, and fascinating study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. It consists of detailed readings of six dramas and one epic poem, from different locations across the African diaspora. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson ask why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle figure so prominently among the tragedies adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedipus and the regressive obsession of Antigone, can articulate the postcolonial moment. Capitalizing on classical reception studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature, Crossroads in the Black Aegean co-ordinates theory and theatre. It crucially investigates how the plays engage with the 'Western canon', and shows how they use their self-consciously literary status to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and that of the Greek originals, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission.
“Compelling new evidence, careful documentation, and an artfully woven narrative make The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis a path-breaking book for sociocultural scholars as well as for general readers interested in the politics of identity, ethnicity, gender, and the colonial and U.S. Western history.”—Transforming Anthropology “Voss’s lucid explanations of method and theory make the book accessible to a broad range of audiences, from upper-level undergraduate and graduate students to professionals and lay audiences. . . . Its interdisciplinarity, indeed, may help to sell archaeology to audiences who do not typically consider archaeological evidence as an option for identity studies....
"Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. 0'Antiquities beyond Humanism' seeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled wi...
Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer puts Walcott's epic poem Omeros in conversation with Homer to show how reading them against each other changes our understanding of both. Rachel Friedman examines Walcott's use of the Homeric persona of Omeros to explore his own deepening relationship with his craft and his identity as a Caribbean poet.