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The ritual ordeal of the athlete re-enacts the ordeals of the warrior, and, like heroic deeds, athletic activity compensates for the athlete’s mortality as the athlete figuratively dies a ritual death in recurrent festivals. The origin of athletics is related both to initiation and to funeral games, and real or symbolic death and rebirth is common to both activities. Epinikian songs refer to those done ‘in compensation for’ (epi) the ordeal involved in winning the victory. Epinician songs also in a sense depict the community’s welfare as being contingent on the reciprocity of aristocratic exchange, and also related to revelry. The non-recurrent agōn occurs in Homeric epic, including gymnic and musikos events (recitation of epics and hymns). Later seasonally recurring festivals became the dominant form. The Panathenaia features the ‘art of the Muses’ among its events, namely rhapsodic contests in the reading of Homer. The apobatēs event in the Panathenaia serves as an evocative link between Homeric heroes in combat and the contestants in armour jumping from chariots in the Athenian games.

Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo is the focus of this chapter. Hailed as its author’s most comprehensive effort at historic panorama, epic in scale, Nostromo also (if somewhat surreptitiously) engages the diminutive form of fairy tale. Combining epic with fairy tale provides the perplexing indeterminacy many readers detect, which is often attributed to Conrad’s literary impressionism. What he reveals, however, is that even the supposedly factual enterprise of history is subject to the vicissitudes commonly accorded “creative” (thus fictive) literary forms like epic, lyric, and fairy tale. History and myth emerge from Nostromo as helpless collaborators in the hybrid fabrications of modern fiction.

This chapter examines scenes in the Aeneid in which Trojan characters are associated with Lucretian atomic imagery. It argues that atomic imagery is used to portray moments of hesitation, difficulty, and doubt for the poem’s protagonists, when they risk straying from their fated mission to found a new city in Latium. Atomic imagery appears during the sack of Troy in Book 2, during the plague on Crete in Book 3, and in descriptions of Aeneas’ indecision in Books 4, 5, and 8. Atomic imagery serves an important thematic function in these scenes, connecting Aeneas’ confusion to Epicurean cosmology in a way that emphasizes both its randomness and its incompatibility with Rome’s imperial destiny.

This chapter offers a revisionary account of the emergence of modernist epic through a detailed reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, the prevailing paradigm for narrations of national destiny was Darwinian. Mostly written between 1903 and 1911, Stein’s book opens as if it were in agreement with such narrations of the national story. Stein announces it as a developmental narrative of the United States, tracing two families’ progressions and westward movement, from a first generation of immigrants to their children and then grandchildren. The Making of Americans, however, does not fulfil its developmentalist prospects in any straightforward manner. Rather, the book stalls, digresses, and—to use Stein’s words—“begins again and again.” In its second half, the narrative comes to resemble less the work of nineteenth-century historians, and more the extensive later portions of modernist modern epics by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce. The chapter describes how Stein’s turn to a digressive open-form narrative corresponds to her shifting interests in biological science and experimental writing. Her work, it argues, marks the advent of new kind of modernist epic, motivated by attempts to find a way to represent national life beyond social Darwinism and its heteropatriarchal protocols.

This chapter re-examines the influence of Ennius on subsequent Latin epic poetry before Lucretius, showing that this influence is far less apparent and much more nuanced than has been generally assumed. Close analysis of the fragments of post-Ennian Republican epic shows that engagement with the Annales during this period was dynamic and eristic, rather than reflexive and inevitable. In the final analysis, this chapter argues for a new conceptualization of the literary terrain into which Lucretius embarks in writing his poem, one marked by creative engagement with the Annales.

This chapter presents a thorough critical study of Orazio Romano’s poem Porcaria, a not very well-known text on Stefano Porcari’s conspiracy against Pope Nicholas V, in 1453. The comprehensive analysis of this work provides a complete reconstruction of the history of the text, based on the examination of the only manuscript copy of the poem still extant, and a thorough investigation of the wide-ranging classical sources used by the author in his work: in particular Vergil, Lucan, Statius, Sallust, Livy, and Claudian. The intertextual analysis points out the complex and multifunctional process of imitation performed by Orazio Romano in the creation of his sophisticated poem: a practice that affects both stylistic and thematic elements and is also aimed at creating a complex dimension of exemplarity. Moreover, the chapter analyses the political perspective of the text, which proves to be closely connected with the system of cultural politics developed by Nicholas V in the same years. Orazio Romano’s poem, in fact, is informed by a secular dimension in dealing with the issue of the conspiracy against the pope. Nicholas V himself emerges in the Porcaria as the figure of a papal prince, whose power is legitimized by an ennobling connection with the classical tradition. Classical symbols, values, and exemplars play a prominent function in bestowing authority on a new kind of papal government typical of the Renaissance age, which assumes the traits of a secular principality.

Background Computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSS) have shown promising effectiveness in improving outpatient antibiotic prescribing. Methods We developed an intervention in the form of EPIC (Verona, WI, USA) order sets comprised of outpatient treatment pathways for 3 pediatric bacterial acute respiratory infections (ARIs) coupled with educational sessions. Four pediatric clinics were randomized into intervention and control arms over pre- and postimplementation study periods. In the intervention clinics, education was provided in between the 2 study periods and EPIC order sets became available at the beginning of the postimplementation period. The primary end point was the percentage of first-line antibiotic prescribing, and the secondary end points included antibiotic duration and antibiotic prescription modification within 14 days. Results A total of 2690 antibiotic prescriptions were included. During the pre-implementation phase, there was no difference in first-line antibiotic prescribing (74.9% vs 77.7%; P = .211) or antibiotic duration (9.69 ± 0.96 days vs 9.63 ± 1.07 days; P > .999) between the study arms. Following implementation, the intervention clinics had a higher percentage of first-line antibiotic prescribing (83.1% vs 77.7%; P = .024) and shorter antibiotic duration (9.28 ± 1.56 days vs 9.79 ± 0.75 days; P < .001) compared with the control clinics. The percentage of modified antibiotics was small in all clinics (1.1%–1.6%) and did not differ before and after the intervention (for all statistical comparisons, P ≤ .354). Conclusions A computerized CDSS involving treatment pathways in the form of order sets coupled with educational sessions was associated with a higher percentage of first-line antibiotic prescribing and shorter antibiotic duration for the outpatient treatment of pediatric bacterial ARIs.

It is generally accepted that 19th-century realist novelists sought to create heroes and heroines who were at once representative and exceptional: representative because they incarnate something instantly recognizable across space and time, exceptional because they must command narrative interest. The heroes of the provincial 19th-century novel struggle to navigate these competing impulses. Their creators inherited a literary tradition that tended to extol larger-than-life figures who, through military exploits or adventures on the border of empire, inspired admiration or worship. However, consonant with the realist novel’s rejection of both epic and Romantic heroes, the authors of provincial novels depict a world of fragmentation, a world that can no longer accommodate heroic ambition. Their provincial settings comprise an arena in which greatness cannot be realized: the province is too far removed from the world historical stage, it seems, too full of petty rivalries, to enable the hero to flourish. The provincial novelists George Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky can be read as case studies of writers who embody this tension. While the thrust of most criticism on both writers is to recast the dearth of heroic activity as a virtue (with the meanness of world historical opportunity being amply assuaged by opportunities for small acts of prosaic, diffusive kindness), Dostoevsky and Eliot treat with regret the inability of their protagonists to realize their heroic aspirations. In so doing, far from throwing their lot in with the limitations of the novel as a genre (i.e., its anti-epic parameters), they maintain a desire to transcend the limits of the novel genre’s mundane presentness. By rescuing their characters from the provincial environments in which they have been unable to realize their heroic feats and by destining them for future action elsewhere, the “here-now” chronotope of the provincial novel is rejected in favor of a “there-then” chronotope which, by definition, cannot be explicated in the form of the novel (and as such, their novels must end with the exile of their protagonists). Although readings of their novels that emphasize the importance of prosaic goodness remain persuasive, they do not altogether invalidate these writers’ desire for heroic activity.

Several biblical epics from the 1950s and 1960s with strong female heroes contain a narrative thread involving the stoning or threat of stoning of these protagonists. Notably, this motif is entirely absent from the biblical stories on which the films are based. This essay examines this feature in three films: David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1950), Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959), and The Story of Ruth (Henry Koster, 1960). I argue that the motif of stoning is adopted from the New Testament story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), and that this use contributes both to the subtle denigration of traditional Judaism and the reinforcement of gender hierarchies that are evident in many Bible films from the post–World War II period.

This chapter offers a broad-ranging discussion of the ways in which Classics could be viewed as both imperialist and anti-imperialist: so T. S. Eliot saw Britain as heir to the Roman Empire, while James Joyce’s Ulysses uses the classics disruptively. At various times the putative coordination of the Latin language with an imperial mentality was deconstructed. The use of Latin in Ireland after the Penal Laws against Catholics could be read as a challenge to the imperial Latin of the British. Later the disparaging attitude towards the Irish language by classicist J. P. Mahaffy and philologist Robert Atkinson collided with the Irish language revival, the supporters of which (e.g. Daniel Corkery) objected to classical languages, yet were paradoxically comparable to Eliot in fetishizing tradition. An alternative view is pointed out by Howard Brenton in The Romans in Britain (1981), which shows the British and the Irish to have common Celtic roots.

Background Lung neuroendocrine neoplasms (LNENs) are rare solid cancers, with most genomic studies including a limited number of samples. Recently, generating the first multi-omic dataset for atypical pulmonary carcinoids and the first methylation dataset for large-cell neuroendocrine carcinomas led us to the discovery of clinically relevant molecular groups, as well as a new entity of pulmonary carcinoids (supra-carcinoids). Results To promote the integration of LNENs molecular data, we provide here detailed information on data generation and quality control for whole-genome/exome sequencing, RNA sequencing, and EPIC 850K methylation arrays for a total of 84 patients with LNENs. We integrate the transcriptomic data with other previously published data and generate the first comprehensive molecular map of LNENs using the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) dimension reduction technique. We show that this map captures the main biological findings of previous studies and can be used as reference to integrate datasets for which RNA sequencing is available. The generated map can be interactively explored and interrogated on the UCSC TumorMap portal (https://tumormap.ucsc.edu/?p=RCG_lungNENomics/LNEN). The data, source code, and compute environments used to generate and evaluate the map as well as the raw data are available, respectively, in a Nextjournal interactive notebook (https://nextjournal.com/rarecancersgenomics/a-molecular-map-of-lung-neuroendocrine-neoplasms/) and at the EMBL-EBI European Genome-phenome Archive and Gene Expression Omnibus data repositories. Conclusions We provide data and all resources needed to integrate them with future LNENs transcriptomic studies, allowing meaningful conclusions to be drawn that will eventually lead to a better understanding of this rare understudied disease.

This chapter establishes the foundations on which the rest of the book is built since post-classical scholarship largely develops from classical models or is shaped by its reaction against those models. The chapter addresses a series of conceptual issues that have recurring relevance, including: differing conceptions of the nature of historical truth; the relationship between History and ethnography; the relationship between rhetoric and historianship; the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and History; and the relationship between ‘useful’ and ‘pleasurable’ Histories. In a more empirical vein the chapter discusses the relationship between Greek and Roman historianship and accounts for different tendencies in the development of historiography in each culture—tendencies like a greater or lesser interest in the outside world, and a greater or lesser interest in individuals as opposed to power structures or the study of society and culture. The question of the consciousness of qualitative historical change is also discussed in the case of a number of historians. In the 900 or so years of historianship covered in this chapter no rationale for History that is present at or near the outset was ruled out by the end, though of course many avenues of possibility were more fully explored. It is more than coincidence that the survey opens and closes with species of History as Identity, beginning with the most elementary type of that genre: genealogy.

Chapter 1 reads Doris Lessing’s space fiction sequence Canopus in Argus: Archives as a critical response to the sociobiology controversy of the 1970s. It argues that Lessing deploys the Sufi theory of cosmic evolution to challenge the atomism and reductionism of neo-Darwinian sociobiology and draws attention to the parallels between Lessing’s reflections on the encounter between subject and world and the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead. It also argues that Lessing’s fiction undermines the stereotypes of race and sex which are associated with sociobiology’s genetic determinism. It is suggested that The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five offers a close analysis of the biosocial formation of gendered dispositions while the Canopus sequence as a whole underscores the co-implication of genetics, race, and empire, in the colonial past as well as in the intergalactic future.

Background: Polyphenols are natural compounds with anticarcinogenic properties in cellular and animal models, but epidemiological evidence determining the associations of these compounds with thyroid cancer (TC) is lacking. Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the relations between blood concentrations of 36 polyphenols and TC risk in EPIC (the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition). Methods: A nested case-control study was conducted on 273 female cases (210 papillary, 45 follicular, and 18 not otherwise specified TC tumors) and 512 strictly matched controls. Blood polyphenol concentrations were analyzed by HPLC coupled to tandem MS after enzymatic hydrolysis. Results: Using multivariable-adjusted conditional logistic regression models, caffeic acid (ORlog2: 0.55; 95% CI: 0.33, 0.93) and its dehydrogenated metabolite, 3,4-dihydroxyphenylpropionic acid (ORlog2: 0.84; 95% CI: 0.71, 0.99), were inversely associated with differentiated TC risk. Similar results were observed for papillary TC, but not for follicular TC. Ferulic acid was also inversely associated only with papillary TC (ORlog2: 0.68; 95% CI: 0.51, 0.91). However, none of these relations was significant after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing. No association was observed for any of the remaining polyphenols with total differentiated, papillary, or follicular TC. Conclusions: Blood polyphenol concentrations were mostly not associated with differentiated TC risk in women, although our study raises the possibility that high blood concentrations of caffeic, 3,4-dihydroxyphenylpropionic, and ferulic acids may be related to a lower papillary TC risk., UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) Medical Research Council UK (MRC) MC_UU_12015/1 MC_UU_00006/1

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, technological wizardry and the fragmentation or complete eschewal of narrative were rapidly becoming the staples of the commercial and the fringe stages respectively. In a postmodern world where ‘grand narratives’ were suspect, all narrative in the theatre was increasingly being viewed as no different from the artifice of the ‘well-made play’ and thus inadequate in the face of contemporary uncertainties. The decisive moment in this anti-narrative turn is often identified as the early 1950s, when the avant-garde in the visual arts, music, and theatre pioneered alternative modes of representation, seen in the works of Ad Reinhardt, John Cage, and Samuel Beckett. Hans-Thies Lehmann dates the turning point in performance to the 1970s and the ‘mediatization’ culture, when a split is perceptible between (text-based) drama and theatre that embraces performance in the broadest terms. Yet in recent decades there has also been plenty of resistance to any avowedly anti-narrative turn in performance and plenty of evidence that epic narratives have been making a comeback on the stage. Chapter 1 examines some of the reasons behind the return to narrative during this period, and the forms in which it can be seen, from storytelling to video games, podcasts to opera.

Vinitsky examines the cultural and historical elements of Vladimir Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, the major and most famous of Russian dictionaries. Dahl’s religious passions and experimental approach to language led to an organizing principle based not on scientific lexicography, but on entries centred on the notion of the word family or ‘nest’. In discussing these features of Dahl’s work, Vinitsky presents the dictionary as an inventive production that was meant to reveal to the reader the communal spirit of Russia through the words of living Russian language. Vinitsky surveys Dahl’s literary and intellectual goals and the structure and pragmatics of his dictionary alongside the interconnected contexts of lexicographical trends in England, reform in Russia, the literary foundations for Dahl’s interest in family structures, and Dahl’s religious and spiritual background. Through his unique approach to language, Dahl worked to cast the Russian language itself as a kind of national epic.

Despite the diversity of Haḍimbā’s character, in recent decades the goddess has become primarily identified with the demoness Hiḍimbā, a renowned figure from the Mahabharata. Drawing on diverse types of materials, this chapter analyzes this identification in light of the different processes indicated by the term Sanskritization, which is also closely explored. Whereas the origins of Haḍimbā’s epic associations remain uncertain, it becomes clear that their current foregrounding is the result of yet another set of encounters and interactions with local, regional, and extraregional forces and ideas. Haḍimbā again emerges here as a complex persona, who serves as a conceptual arena for her devotees to reflect on their self-perception and sense of belonging and to recast their own cultural marginality in a new, inclusive, and rather flattering light. The chapter concludes by showing how the process of Haḍimbā’s Mahabharatization projects outward in ever-growing circles.