Our Mythical Childhood The Classics And Literature For Children And Young Adults

In The Classics and Children's Literature between West and East a team of contributors from different continents offers a survey of the reception of Classical Antiquity in children’s and young adults’ literature by applying regional perspectives.

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.

How did the Greeks and Romans perceive rape? How seriously was it taken, and who were seen as its main victims? These are two central questions that Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds (1997), edited by Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce, aimed to approach in twelve chapters. Setting out to understand if the ancients had a concept of rape and how it was understood through different angles – including legal, social, cultural and historiographical – Rape in Antiquity made an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on sexual violence in the ancient world, impacting upon the development of new approaches in the decades that followed its publication. Revisiting Rape in Antiquity: Sexualised Violence in Greek and Roman Worlds maps out the influence of Rape in Antiquity while exploring how far cultural changes since the 1990s have reshaped the scholarly landscape. This collection, comprising chapters by established scholars and early career researchers from many countries, provides a new window into sexual – and sexualized – violence. Covering a long chronology, this book journeys from Homer to Byzantium, to modern receptions, to the analysis of wartime rape, ancient Greek tragedy, classical myth, how stories involving rape are retold for children, ancient law and rhetoric, classical art, Ovid, Late Antiquity, modern literature, comic books and cinema. This book is the culmination of a rich scholarly inheritance, setting out new perspectives that will hopefully inspire researchers for decades to come.

The Modern Hercules explores the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – in western culture from the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring the hero’s transformations of identity and significance in a wide range of media.

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day. Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples

Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined? This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies. Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences.

Leading and emerging, early career scholars in Classical Reception Studies come together in this volume to explore the under-represented area of the Australasian Classical Tradition. They interrogate the interactions between Mediterranean Antiquity and the antipodean worlds of New Zealand and Australia through the lenses of literature, film, theatre and fine art. Of interest to scholars across the globe who research the influence of antiquity on modern literature, film, theatre and fine art, this volume fills a decisive gap in the literature by bringing antipodean research into the spotlight. Following a contextual introduction to the field, the six parts of the volume explore the latest research on subjects that range from the Lord of the Rings and Xena: Warrior Princess franchises to important artists such as Sidney Nolan and local authors whose work offers opportunities for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis with well-known Western authors and artists.

Beginning with Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit and concluding with best-selling series still ongoing at the time of writing, this volume examines works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children's literature that incorporate character types, settings, and narratives derived from the Greco-Roman past. Drawing on a cognitive poetics approach to reception studies, it argues that authors typically employ a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors - palimpsest, map, and fractal - to organize the classical past for preteen and adolescent readers. Palimpsest texts see the past as a collection of strata in which each new era forms a layer superimposed upon a foundation laid earlier; map texts use the metaphor of the mappable journey to represent a protagonist's process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world; fractal texts, in which small parts of the narrative are thematically identical to the whole, present the past in a way that implies that history is infinitely repeatable. While a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook emerge from the case studies examined in each chapter, revealing remarkable thematic continuities in how the past is represented and how agency is attributed to protagonists: each model, it is suggested, uses the classical past to urge and thus perhaps to develop a particular approach to life.