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Why does Bassanio compare himself to Jason? What is Hecuba to Hamlet? Is the mechanicals'staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe story funny or sad? This dictionary elucidates Shakespeare's use of mythological references in an early modern context, while bringing them to life for today's audiences and readers, at a time of renewed critical interest in the reception of the classics and fascination with classical mythology in popular culture. It is also a precious tool for practitioners who may not always know quite what to make of mythological references.Mythological figures, creatures, places and stories crowd Shakespeare's plays and poems, featuring as allusions, poetic analogies, inset shows, scene settings and characters or plots in their own right. Most of these references were familiar to Shakespeare's spectators and readers, who knew them from the writings of Ovid, Virgil and other classical authors, or indirectly through translations, commentaries, ballads and iconography. This dictionary illustrates how, far from being isolated, a mythological reference may resonate with the poetics of the text and its structure, cast light on characters and contexts, and may therefore be worth exploring onstage in a variety of ways. The 200 headings correspond to words and names actually used by Shakespeare: individual figures (Dido, Venus, Hercules), categories (Amazons, Centaurs, nymphs, satyrs), places (Colchos, Troy). Medium and longer entries also cover early modern usage and critical analysis in a cross-disciplinary approach that includes reception, textual, performance, gender and political studies.

La trayectoria lírica de Lope de Vega se ha venido estudiando a través de diferentes máscaras autoriales que el poeta adopta según épocas e intereses. Haciendo gala del sobrenombre por el que se le conoció en vida, el Fénix se reinventa y se sucede a sí mismo: poeta de romancero, poeta de cancioneros petrarquistas, sacro, cortesano, e incluso burlesco. De todos ellos, el Lope cortesano o culto no ha recibido la atención que merece, pues ni tan siquiera las obras cumbres de esa etapa gozan de ediciones críticas actualizadas. Hablamos, pues, de un poeta que, tras la subida al trono de Felipe IV, pone una pica en el mercado editorial con dos obras de difícil taxonomía genérica: La Filomena (1621) y La Circe (1624). Con ellas, Lope se adentra en subgéneros literarios por él poco transitados, como la novela breve de corte cervantino. Pero ¿qué motiva tal viraje autorial en la década de los veinte?, ¿qué persigue Lope con estos dos peculiares volúmenes y qué estrategias emplea para la construcción de este renovado yo? A todas esas preguntas, y otras de mayor calado, se dirige este estudio, cuyas hipótesis pretenden, en definitiva, esbozar un perfil más nítido del autor en su plena madurez.Disponible en acceso abierto.

The gods have much to tell us about performance. When human actors portray deities onstage, such divine epiphanies reveal not only the complexities of mortals playing gods but also the nature of theatrical spectacle itself. The very impossibility of rendering the gods in all their divine splendor in a truly convincing way lies at the intersection of divine power and the power of the theater. This book pursues these dynamics on the stages of ancient Athens and Rome as well on those of Renaissance England to shed new light on theatrical performance. The authors reveal how gods appear onstage both to astound and to dramatize the very machinations by which theatrical performance operates. Offering an array of case studies featuring both canonical and lesser-studied texts, this volume discusses work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plautus as well as Beaumont, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.This book uniquely brings together the joint perspectives of two experts on classical and Renaissance drama. This volume will appeal to students and enthusiasts of literature, classics, theater, and performance studies.

What is it about ancient monsters that popular culture still finds so enthralling? Why do the monsters of antiquity continue to stride across the modern world? In this book, the first in-depth study of how post-classical societies use the creatures from ancient myth, Liz Gloyn reveals the trends behind how we have used monsters since the 1950s to the present day, and considers why they have remained such a powerful presence in our shared cultural imagination. She presents a new model for interpreting the extraordinary vitality that classical monsters have shown, and their enormous adaptability in finding places to dwell in popular culture without sacrificing their connection to the ancient world. Her argument takes her readers through a comprehensive tour of monsters on film and television, from the much-loved creations of Ray Harryhausen in Clash of the Titans to the monster of the week in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before looking in detail at the afterlives of the Medusa and the Minotaur. She develops a broad theory of the ancient monster and its life after antiquity, investigating its relation to gender, genre and space to offer a bold and novel exploration of what keeps drawing us back to these mythical beasts. From the siren to the centaur, all monster lovers will find something to enjoy in this stimulating and accessible book.

Der Band zeigt die vielfältigen Themen griechischer Dichtung in der Spätantike. In den Werken des Nonnos von Panopolis und in der „Ekphrasis“ des Johannes von Gaza wirken heidnische und christliche Themen zusammen, die Dichtungen des Georgios Pisides werden vor dem Hintergrund spätantiker Philosophie gelesen und die Autobiographien Gregors von Nazianz als literarische Ausdrucksformen. Analysiert werden die ekphrastischen Erzähltechniken bei Quintus Smyrnaeus und die Figurenkomposition bei Kollouthos, zudem wird Lykophron als Quelle für die „Dionysiaka“ des Nonnos beleuchtet. Gestalten der Mythologie begegnen sich ebenso wie Zyklopen und Elefanten, und spätantike Epigrammatik wird im kulturellen und literarischen Umfeld der Zeit kontextualisiert.

Classical Antiquity is strongly present in youth culture globally. It accompanies children during their initiation into adulthood and thereby deepens their knowledge of the cultural code based on the Greek and Roman heritage. It enables intergenerational communication, with the reception of the Classics being able to serve as a marker of transformations underway in societies the world over. The team of contributors from Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand focuses on the reception of mythical creatures as the key to these transformations, including the changes in human mentality. The volume gathers the results of a stage of the programme ‘Our Mythical Childhood', supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Alumni Award for Innovative Networking Initiatives and an ERC Consolidator Grant. Thanks to the multidisciplinary character of its research (Classics, Modern Philologies, Animal Studies) and to the universal importance of the theme of childhood, the volume offers stimulating reading for scholars, students, and educators, as well as for a wider audience.

Il ragazzo si getta disteso sull'erba, attratto dalla fonte e dal luogo stupendo, spossato dal caldo e più dalla caccia bruciante. Si prova a calmare la sete e cresce una sete diversa. Gli appare un riflesso bellissimo, bevendo, e ne perde la testa: lo coglie l'amore di un'ombra che è spoglia del corpo. La prende per corpo, ma è acqua soltanto. Le Metamorfosi di Ovidio: un'opera ricca di fascino poetico, concepita per sfidare il tempo e vincerlo. Duecentocinquanta storie che nascono l'una dall'altra a velocità vorticosa, condensando l'intera mitologia classica. Le governa il principio della continua trasformazione, perché'tutto muta, nulla muore; tutto scorre, e ogni immagine si forma nel movimento'. E per raccontare il divenire come forma più vera dell'essere occorre capacità di vedere i corpi, di ascoltarne le voci e di riprodurle con eco infinita: di comprendere fino in fondo le passioni che si agitano nell'animo di donne uomini dèi e che determinano, insieme al destino e al caso, le esistenze e il mondo.

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal. No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships among these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.

The second volume in Jane Chance's study of the history of medieval mythography from the fifth through fifteenth centuries focuses on the time period in Western Europe between the School of Chartres and the papal court at Avignon. This examination of historical and philosophical developments in the story of mythography reflects the ever-increasing importance of the subjectivity of the commentator. Through her vast and wide-ranging familiarity with hitherto seldom studied primary texts spanning nearly one thousand years, Chance provides a guide to the assimilation of classical myth into the Christian Middle Ages. Rich in insight and example, dense in documentation, and compelling in its interpretations, Medieval Mythography is an important tool for scholars of the classical tradition and for medievalists working in any language.

The mythic world of Juno, Jupiter's consort, is one of flesh and begetting, of suffering and death, and of poetry itself. Exploring the relationship between that realm of the classical gods and the sphere of medieval mythographers, Jane Chance illuminates the efforts of medieval writers to understand human existence and the forces of nature in relation to Christian truth.

Building upon the explosion of recent work on mythography, contributions to this volume direct attention to less frequently explored questions of how ancient poets, historians, and philosophers themselves adopted and adapted the work of mythographers. Study of the way that mythographers and their contemporaries take on positions of, alternately, “host” or “parasite” in relation to the other exposes the richness mythographic practice and the roles that mythographers played in the evolving Greco-Roman discourse of myth. From, among others, the seeds of mythographic discourse in Pindar and Plato, to the mythography of the Peripatics, the in-between mythography of Diodorus Siculus, and the “mythographic topography” of Pausanias, this volume invites a reappraisal of the role that mythography played at every stage of Greek thought about myth. Through contributions that explore both mythographers'distinctive style of studying myth to other contributions that focus primarily on the how and why of non-mythographers'use of mythographic techniques, what emerges is a picture of mythography that broadens our conception of mythography while at the same time inviting scholars to seek out more such echoes of mythographic discourse in the work of poets, historians, philosophers at large.

Excerpt from Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (Classic Reprint)The term classical mythology has been taken to include not only the divinities of the ancient religion and such tales as those of Ovid's Metamorphoses, but also the heroes of the Trojan war and the personages of the Eneid. In a number of cases, such, for example, as Fortune, Nature, and Fame, it has not been easy to draw a hard and fast line between mythology and mere philosophical personification. In Part First, where the myths are discussed severally, I have been inclined to include such subjects, while excluding them as doubtful from the generalizations Of Part Second and the Introduction.

The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects, although until very recently it has received almost no attention within the growing field of classical reception studies. This volume explores the ways in which children encountered the world of ancient Greece and Rome in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the 1850s, as well as adults'literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. Rather than discussing the role of classics in education, it focuses on books read for enjoyment, and on two genres of children's literature in particular: the myth collection and the historical novel. The tradition of myths retold as children's stories is traced in the work of writers and illustrators from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley to Roger Lancelyn Green and Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, while the discussion of historical fiction focuses particularly on the roles of nationality and gender in the construction of an ancient world for modern children. The book concludes with an investigation of the connections between childhood and antiquity made by writers for adults, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. Recognition of the fundamental role in children's literature of adults'ideas about what children want or need is balanced throughout by attention to the ways in which child readers have made such works their own. The formative experiences of antiquity discussed throughout help to explain why despite growing uncertainty about the appeal of antiquity to modern children, the classical past remains perennially interesting and inspiring.

This study brings to light the significant and long-obscured influence of the Roman dramatist and philosopher, Seneca, on the works of Racine. After describing the positive characteristics of Senecan tragedy and the crucial role it played in French drama from Jodelle through Corneille, Ronald W. Tobin analyzes Racine's unique adoption and absorption of Senecan material into his own plays, thereby extending the dimensions of his dramatic art. In the book's Conclusion, some theories are advanced for Racine's well-known silence about his debt to Seneca.

Die Kenntnis der Mythen antiker Götter- und Heldengestalten spielte stets eine gewisse, nicht selten eine maßgebliche Rolle in kreativen Prozessen des Mittelalters, im Bereich der literarischen wie in dem der visuellen Kultur. War die Analyse mittelalterlicher Mythenrezeption bisher zumeist von der Vorstellung eines verselbständigten Nachlebens der Antike geprägt, versteht dieses Buch die mittelalterlichen Phänomene als selbstbewusste, absichtsvolle Kreationen. Exemplarisch untersuchen Kunsthistoriker, Archäologen, Althistoriker und Literaturwissenschaftler mehrerer Nationalitäten über die Breite der Epoche hinweg historisch relevante Erscheinungsformen mittelalterlicher Mythenrezeption. Sie erschließen so ein erstes Raster, das es erlaubt, Phasen unterschiedlicher künstlerischer Gestaltungsformen und -absichten zu erkennen.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book'English Seneca read by candlelight,'wrote the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe,'will afford you whole Hamlets.'In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary and theater historians took Nashe at his word,finding Senecan tragedy at the source of Renaissance drama. More recently, critics have been inclined to dismiss traces of classical antiquity as a superficial veneer on a drama derived from medieval traditions. Lorraine Helms revisits this terrain to explore the rich and various ways in which classical learning shaped the theatrical culture of the Renaissance. She uncovers the practical advice on acting and stagecraft to be found in the writings of ancient rhetoricians; reconstructs the extraordinary circumstances under which an English woman first rendered Euripides into her native language; and ponders the precedents in antiquity for Elizabethan portrayals of prostitution and female martyrdom.

Nymphs, maenads, goddesses, and heroines from classical myth populate nineteenth-century American women writers'fiction in exhilaratingly innovative, often multilayered and complex reconfigurations. Based on Hans Blumenberg's notion of artists'ongoing “work on myth” and Aby Warburg's concept of ‘pathos formulaeʼ, this monograph explores the functions and meanings of these ancient figures in image and text. Examining novels by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott, this study sheds light on the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of these American women writers across a range of genres. Furthermore, the book challenges the assumption that women's “work on myth” did not thrive until the second half of the nineteenth century and proposes an approach to overcome the persisting binary and gendered opposition between myth and logos as the ‘feminine'body and the ‘male'mind.

How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific, political, and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- is a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique.

The Ciris has received a certain amount of scholarly attention during the twentieth century, but on the whole has failed to meet with an adequate appreciation. This book aims to vindicate the Ciris, mainly by exploring its use of pre-Virgilian poetic texts largely ignored in previous scholarship. The core of the book consists of a discursive literary commentary, divided into chapters that examine consecutively the poem's main narrative units. Viewing allusion and allegory as intrinsic features of poetic composition rather than mere artistic devices, the book explores, among more prominent intertexts, Apollonius'Argonautica and Callimachus'Hecale, Lucretius and Catullus 64. Allusions are also suggested to Homer and Empedocles, Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion, Nicander and Euphorion, Choerilus of Samos and Asius of Samos, Ennius and Cicero. Through its intricate web of references to poetic intertexts, the Ciris, it is argued, creates an implicit allegorical pattern with an original poetological message. Allusion and Allegory is thus the first book-length study to offer a coherent literary interpretation of this controversial poem.

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns.Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand's foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

The relationship between humans and dolphins has been a subject of interest since earliest times… This fascinating book explores first the classical background to Arion and his dolphin story and then its treatment by French literary and artistic figures who, in a variety of genres and forms, have recreated the story and brought out new meanings more appropriate to their particular times.”

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal.Chance's in-depth examination of works by the major writers of the period—including Dante, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan—demonstrates how they essentially co-opted a thousand-year tradition. Their intricate narratives of identity mixed commentary with poetry; reinterpreted classical gods and heroes to suit personal agendas; and gave rise to innovative techniques such as “inglossation,” the use of a mythological figure to comment on the protagonist within an autobiographical allegory. In this manner, through allegorical authorial projection of the self, the poets explored a subjective world and manifested a burgeoning humanism that would eventually come to full fruition in the Renaissance.No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships between these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.

A fresh reading of the Legend shows it to be one of Chaucer's most carefully crafted and significant works.Professor Collette's approach to this challenging and provocative poem reflects her wide scholarly interests, her expertise in the area of representations of women in late medieval European society, and her conviction that the Legend of Good Women can be better understood when positioned within several of the era's intellectual concerns and historical contexts. The book will enrich the ongoing conversation among Chaucerians as to the significance of the Legend, both as an individual cultural production and an important constituent of Chaucer's poetic.achievement. A praiseworthy and useful monograph. Professor Robert Hanning, Columbia University. The Legend of Good Women has perhaps not always had the appreciation or attention it deserves. Here, it is read as one of Chaucer's major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated work whose veneer of transparency and narrow focus masks a vital inquiry into basic questions of value, moderation, and sincerity in late medieval culture. The volume places Chaucer within several literary contexts developed in separate chapters: early humanist bibliophilia, translation and the development of the vernacular; late medieval compendia of exemplary narratives centred in women's choices written by Boccaccio, Machaut, Gower and Christine de Pizan; and the pervasive late fourteenth-century cultural influence of Aristotelian ideas of the mean, moderation, and value, focusing on Oresme's translations of the Ethics into French. It concludes with two chapters on the context of Chaucer's continual reconsideration of issues of exchange, moderation and fidelity apparent in thematic, figurative and semantic connections that link the Legend both to Troilus and Criseyde and to the women of The Canterbury Tales. Carolyn Collette is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College and a Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.

Jean-François FROGER, chercheur en anthropologie et exégète. Bernard VERTEN est professeur agrégé de lettres classiques. La voie du désir selon le mythe d'Eros et Psyché est le cinquième ouvrage de Jean-François FROGER. L'ouvrage aborde un ancien mythe grec qui traite, à travers le style d'un conte, du problème du désir (Cupidon-Eros) et de l'âme (Psyché). Le conte nous est parvenu par la tradition romanesque d'Apulée, auteur latin du Iie siècle. Pour étudier avec précision les images du mythe, véhiculées par le conte, il fallait disposer d'une traduction nouvelle, dont le souci ne fût pas d'abord littéraire mais sémiotique ; c'est pourquoi on s'appuie ici sur la traduction de Bernard VERTEN qui y a apporté toute l'érudition et la précision nécessaires. L'ouvrage traite de l'éveil de la vie psychique profonde à l'amour de l'Amour, au désir du Désir. L'interprétation de toutes ces figures est une introduction au travail intérieur qui conduit de la beauté à l'amour. La voie du désir est aussi la voie de la métamorphose de la beauté visible en la réalité qu'elle symbolise.

In these reflections on the mercurial qualities of style in Ovid's Meta-morphoses, Garth Tissol contends that stylistic features of the ever-shifting narrative surface, such as wordplay, narrative disruption, and the self-conscious reworking of the poetic tradition, are thematically significant. It is the style that makes the process of reading the work a changing, transformative experience, as it both embodies and reflects the poem's presentation of the world as defined by instability and flux. Tissol deftly illustrates that far from being merely ornamental, style is as much a site for interpretation as any other element of Ovid's art.In the first chapter, Tissol argues that verbal wit and wordplay are closely linked to Ovidian metamorphoses. Wit challenges the ordinary conceptual categories of Ovid's readers, disturbing and extending the meanings and references of words. Thereby it contributes on the stylistic level to the readers'apprehension of flux. On a larger scale, parallel disturbances occur in the progress of narratives. In the second and third chapters, the author examines surprise and abrupt alteration of perspective as important features of narrative style. We experience reading as a transformative process not only in the characteristic indirection and unpredictability of Ovid's narrative but also in the memory of his predecessors. In the fourth chapter, Tissol shows how Ovid subsumes Vergil's Aeneid into the Metamorphoses in an especially rich allusive exploitation, one which contrasts Vergil's aetiological themes with those of his own work.Originally published in 1997.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This volume reveals how Apuleius'Metamorphoses - the only fully extant Roman novel and a classic of world literature - works as a piece of literature, exploring its poetics and the way in which questions of production and reception are reflected in its text. Providing a roughly linear reading of key passages, the volume develops an original idea of Apuleius as an ambitious writer led by the literary tradition, rhetoric, and Platonism, and argues that he created what we could call a seriocomic'philosophical novel'avant la lettre. The author focuses, in particular, on the ways in which Apuleius drew attention to his achievement and introduced the Greek ass story to Roman literature. Thus, the volume also sheds new light on the forms and the literary and intellectual potential of the genre of the ancient novel.

Wer erzählt die Metamorphosen? Gibt es nur einen Erzähler? Muss man überhaupt zwischen Autor und Erzähler trennen? Und ist die Haltung des Erzählers nun distanziert-ironisch oder fromm-naiv? Die vorliegende Arbeit liefert mittels aktueller narratologischer und rezeptionsästhetischer Analyseverfahren eine Typologie der primären Erzählerfigur von Ovids Epos. Zudem zeigt sie anhand detaillierter Textinterpretationen, wie inkonsistent Ovid seinen Erzähler konstruiert hat. Im Ergebnis wird die Neuartigkeit von Ovids Erzählanlage gegenüber tradierten Formen epischen Erzählens deutlich: Seine Erzählerfigur ist schillernder und präsenter, zudem oftmals keineswegs allwissend und objektiv – und vor allem fehlt ihr vielfach die eigentlich zukommende Zuverlässigkeit und Autorität.

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.

This engaging, readable yet impeccably scholarly investigation of monsters in Classical literature will entertain and stimulate as well as inform. It covers all the major mythical monsters mentioned by Greek and Roman authors (Medusa, Hydra, Polyphemus, the Minotaur, Sphinx, Harpies, Sirens, Cerberus, Chimaera, Centaurs, and many more) along with Classical precursors of vampires, werewolves and the living dead. Versions of these creatures that appear in later literature and film are also discussed.Mythical Monsters is original in considering monsters squarely from a literary standpoint, introducing elements of literary analysis gradually as the work progresses, and building up to quite a sophisticated approach. This will increase readers'critical appreciation and plain enjoyment of these stories, which continue to fascinate today. To facilitate browsing, each chapter can be read independently. There is a useful bibliography, and the book is enlivened by illustrations from ancient and more recent art.

These new essays explore the ways in which contemporary dramatists have retold or otherwise made use of myths, fairy tales and legends from a variety of cultures, including Greek, West African, North American, Japanese, and various parts of Europe. The dramatists discussed range from well-established playwrights such as Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, and Timberlake Wertenbaker to new theatrical stars such as Sarah Ruhl and Tarell Alvin McCraney. The book contributes to the current discussion of adaptation theory by examining the different ways, and for what purposes, plays revise mythic stories and characters. The essays contribute to studies of literary uses of myth by focusing on how recent dramatists have used myths, fairy tales and legends to address contemporary concerns, especially changing representations of women and the politics of gender relations but also topics such as damage to the environment and political violence.

Perhaps no other classical text has proved its versatility so much as Ovid's epic poem. A staple of undergraduate courses in Classical Studies, Latin, English and Comparative Literature, Metamorphoses is arguably one of the most important, canonical Latin texts and certainly among the most widely read and studied.Ovid's'Metamorphoses': A Reader's Guide is the ideal companion to this epic classical text offering guidance on:• Literary, historical and cultural context• Key themes• Reading the text• Reception and influence• Further reading

Here for the first time, the various French treatments of Dido's tragic story in both drama and music, most of which are little known today, are brought together, examined, compared, and evaluated. In Virgil's Aeneid, the evocation of Dido's great and fateful passion had an impact that has continued to reverberate over two millennia. Among the vast array of artistic creations that Dido has inspired are a number of French tragedies and musical works from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. This study embraces different genres and spans several centuries, demonstrates the commonalities between the works, and reveals the individuality and uniqueness of each interpretation. This study first looks at the broader European context before the French dramas, cantatas and operas are each analyzed in detail. What emerges is that there is indeed a myriad of ways to tell and interpret a story. The various interpretations show an intriquing and sometimes surprising degree of individuality on the part of these writers and composers.

This book provides a unique and accessible introduction to the complete works of Ovid. Using a thematic approach, Volk lays out what we know about Ovid's life, presents the author's works within their poetic genres, and discusses central Ovidian themes. The first general introduction to Ovid written in English in over 20 years, offering the very latest Ovidian scholarship Discusses the complete works of Ovid Accessible writing and a thematic approach make this text ideal for a broad audience A current revival in Ovid makes this timely edition highly valuable

Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso's lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and enchantment of great literature.From the banishment of the classical divinities during the Age of Reason to their emancipation by the Romantics and their place in the literature of our own time, the history of the gods can also be read as a ciphered and splendid history of literary inspiration. Rewriting that story, Calasso carves out a sacred space for literature where the presence of the gods is discernible. His inquiry into the nature of “absolute literature” transports us to the realms of Dionysus and Orpheus, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and prompts a lucid and impassioned defense of poetic form, even when apparently severed from any social function. Lyrical and assured, Literature and the Gods is an intensely engaging work of literary affirmation that deserves to be read alongside the masterpieces it celebrates.

As both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato famously banned tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that their representations of vicious behavior could deform minds. Aristotle set out to answer Plato's objections, arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and that it promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. Aristotle's definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on later Latin literature, beginning with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC - AD 65). Scholarship over the last fifty years, however, has increasingly sought to identify in Seneca's prose writings a Platonic poetics which is antagonistic toward tragedy and which might therefore explain why Seneca's plays seem so often to present the failure of Stoicism. As Gregory Staley argues in this book, when Senecan tragedy fails to stage virtue we should see in this not the failure of Stoicism but a Stoic conception of tragedy as the right vehicle for imaging Seneca's familiar world of madmen and fools. Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle's conception of the genre as a vivid image of the truth and treats tragedy as a natural venue in which to explore the human soul. Staley's reading of Seneca's plays draws on current scholarship about Stoicism as well as on the writings of Renaissance authors like Sir Philip Sidney, who borrowed from Seneca the word'idea'to designate what we would now label as a'theory'of tragedy. Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy will appeal broadly to students and scholars of classics, ancient philosophy, and English literature.

The transmission of the Seneca tragedies first became an object of critical discussion by the Italian humanists and has continued to occupy scholars to the present day. Besides a brief account of the critical work of Jodocus Badius (Ascensiana 1514) and of Girolamo Avanzi (Aldina 1517) the repertory lists systematically the conjectures recorded since M.A. Delrio (Second ed., 1619) down to the year 2007 and arranges them in the context of the critical discussion of the text. Conceived in the first instance as a work of reference for future editors, commentators and critical readers of the tragedies, the repertory is also a mirror of the critical acumen as well as the vagaries in the long tradition of Latin textual criticism.Die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Überlieferung der Seneca-Tragödien beginnt im humanistischen Italien und wird seither intensiv betrieben; entsprechend zahlreich sind die Eingriffe und Vorschläge, welche zum besseren Verständnis des überlieferten Textes vorgetragen worden sind. Neben einem Einblick in die kritische Arbeit von Jodocus Badius (Ascensiana 1514) und von Girolamo Avanzi (Aldina 1517) verzeichnet das Repertorium systematisch die seit M.A. Delrio (2. Ausg. 1619) bis zum Jahre 2007 erfassten Konjekturen und ordnet sie unter jeweiliger Angabe des Fundortes in die textkritische Diskussion ein. Das Repertorium ist in erster Linie als Nachschlagewerk für künftige Herausgeber und Kommentatoren der Seneca-Tragödien gedacht. Als Spiegel von Scharfsinn und Irrungen in der Konjekturalkritik leistet es zudem einen Beitrag zur traditionsreichen Geschichte der lateinischen Philologie.

A Companion to Ovid is a comprehensive overview of one of the most influential poets of classical antiquity. Features more than 30 newly commissioned chapters by noted scholars writing in their areas of specialization Illuminates various aspects of Ovid's work, such as production, genre, and style Presents interpretive essays on key poems and collections of poems Includes detailed discussions of Ovid's primary literary influences and his reception in English literature Provides a chronology of key literary and historical events during Ovid's lifetime

The Protean Ass provides the most comprehensive account (in any language) of the reception of The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, the only work of Latin prose fiction worthy of the name of'novel'to survive intact from the ancient world. Apuleius'second-century account of the curious young man who is changed into a donkey following an affair with a witch's slave-girl, and undergoes a series of adventures (involving robbery, adultery, buggery, and bestiality) before a divine vision transforms him into a disciple of the goddess Isis, has delighted, perplexed, and inspired readers as diverse as St Augustine, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Robert H. F. Carver traces readers'responses to the novel from the third to the seventeenth centuries in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and England

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca. Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America's broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

The 14th century English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is admired for its morally complex plot and brilliant poetics. A chivalric romance placed in an Arthurian setting, it has since received acclaim for its commentary regarding important socio-political and religious concerns. The poem's technical brilliance blends psychological depth and vivid language to produce an effect widely considered superior to any other work of the time. Although the poem is a combination of English alliterative meter, romanticism, and a wide-ranging knowledge of Celtic lore, continental materials and Latin classics, the extent to which Classical antecedents affected or directed the poem is a point of continued controversy among literary scholars. This collection of essays by scholars of diverse interests addresses this puzzling and fascinating question. The introduction provides an expansive background for the topic, and subsequent essays explore the extent to which classical Greek, Roman, Arabic, Christian and Celtic influences are revealed in the poem's opening and closing allusions, themes, and composition. Essays discuss the way in which the anonymous author of Sir Gawain employs figural echoes of classical materials, cultural memoirs of past British tradition, and romantic re-textualizations of Trojan and British literature. It is argued that Sir Gawain may be understood as an Aeneas, Achilles, or Odysseus figure, while the British situation in the 14th century may be understood as analogous to that of ancient Troy.

Ovid's Heroides, a catalogue of letters by women who have been deserted, has too frequently been examined as merely a lament. In a new departure, this book portrays the women of the Heroides as a community of authors. Combining close readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with critical methods, the book argues that the points of similarity between the different letters of the Heroides, so often derided by modern critics, represent a brilliant exploitation of intratextuality, in which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously fashions herself as an alluding author influenced by what she has read within the Heroides. Far from being naive and impotent victims, therefore, the heroines are remarkably astute, if not always successful, at adapting textual strategies that they perceive as useful for attaining their own ends. With this new approach Professor Fulkerson shows that the Heroides articulate a fictional poetic, mirroring contemporary practices of poetic composition.

Die Verarbeitung der antiken Mythologie - und z.T. auch der jüdisch-christlichen und der germanischen - in Heinrich Heines Werk ist Thema dieser Studie, die aufgrund ihrer Materialfülle und Gliederung auch als Handbuch und Nachschlagewerk benutzt werden kann.

Der Begriff der Mythenkorrektur ist innerhalb der Literaturwissenschaft (noch) nicht etabliert. Ziel des Bandes ist es, ihn vorzustellen und anhand exemplarischer Interpretationen seine Erschließungskraft zu dokumentieren. Denn in zahlreichen Werken der Literatur wird ein tradierter Zusammenhang von Mythen als bekannt vorausgesetzt, aber an einer bestimmten Stelle wird das überlieferte Geschehen negiert. Die Frau des Kandaules sei nicht schön gewesen, die Sirenen hätten nicht gesungen, Ödipus sei von der Nachricht nicht überrascht worden (Brecht) usw. Die Berichtigungen setzen jeweils an einem markanten Punkt ein, so dass der Eingriff die wohlbekannten Geschichten in ein ganz neues Licht rückt, den Kern des Mythos aber prinzipiell unangetastet lässt. Der vorliegende Band untersucht eingehend die Formen und Funktionsweisen solcher Mythenkorrekturen. Dabei werden einschlägige Werke der europäischen Literatur behandelt und deren Interpretationen mit Überlegungen zum antiken Mythos, zur christlichen Mythenkorrektur, zur Neuen Mythologie und zur Mythenkorrektur vom Existenzialismus bis zur Postmoderne verbunden. Das Spektrum der untersuchten Texte ist weit gehalten, um den Begriff der Korrektur nicht unangemessen zu verkürzen. Untersucht werden z.B. Texte von Heiner Müller, Thomas Brasch, Christa Wolf und Volker Braun ebenso wie von Shakespeare, Goethe und Kleist. Pluspunkte: Innovativer Sammelband mit einem neuartigen literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept zur Mythenrezeption Komparatistische Perspektive: Verschiedene europäische Literaturen werden einbezogen Einschlägig ausgewiesene Herausgeber und Autoren

The great nineteenth-century English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson received an unusually thorough education in the classical languages, and he remained an active classical scholar throughout his lifetime. His intimate knowledge of both Greek and Latin literature left an indelible stamp on his poetry, both in terms of the sound and rhythm of his verses and in the themes that inspired him. Stateliest Measures, the first full-length study of Tennyson's thematic and metrical uses of classical material, examines the profoundly important role that his classical background played as he fashioned himself into a poet in the 1820s and 30s, and as he defined himself as poet laureate as of 1850.A.A. Markley examines Tennyson's objectives in developing the classical dramatic monologue, which, together with In Memoriam and his experiments with classical meters, indicate the degree to which he patterned himself after the Roman poet Virgil in attempting to provide modern Britain with a literature worthy of a new and rapidly expanding world empire. Stateliest Measures demonstrates that Tennyson's engagement with the long-running and complex nineteenth-century debates concerning Hellenism, Imperialism, and modern British culture was much more profound than his critics have recognized.

The most important medium of Seneca's Lebenskunst is language. We first change the meaning of words through philosophical reflection; then we can change ourselves through language. Each chapter in this book takes linguistic or stylistic observations in texts as starting point (e.g. metaphors from the domains of health, finance, and sea-faring). Topics are man's self-definition in time and place and his relation to property, learning, and tradition. Single words and rhetorical patterns guide us in constructing an inner world and to find our own identity. Texts in Latin and in translation document Seneca's importance for modern, Christian Europe.

Ancient literature features many powerful narratives of madness, depression, melancholy, lovesickness, simple boredom, and the effects of such psychological states upon individual sufferers. Peter Toohey turns his attention to representations of these emotional states in the Classical, Hellenistic, and especially the Roman imperial periods in a study that illuminates the cultural and aesthetic significance of this emotionally charged literature. His probing analysis shows that a shifting representation of these afflicted states, and the concomitant sense of isolation from one's social affinities and surroundings, manifests a developing sense of the self and self-consciousness in the ancient world. This book makes important contributions to a variety of disciplines including classical studies, comparative literature, literary and art history, history of medicine, history of emotions, psychiatry, and psychology. Peter Toohey is Professor and Department Head of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada.

This book explores Callimachus'allusive practice in his Aetia prologue and Hymns 4, 5, and 6, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The study includes an overview of modern approaches to poetic allusion, a close (re-)examination of the lexical allusions in the Aetia's and Metamorphoses'prologues, extensive examinations of allusive techniques within selections of these works, the poets'use of'signposting'and'authorization'techniques, and the relationship between allusion and genre.