The Classical Tradition In Modern American Fiction

This book is an invaluable survey of the allusions to ancient Greek and Roman culture in the work of seven major modern American novelists: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Marilynne Robinson.

A reissue in paperback of a title first published in 1949.

Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.

In this volume, Roynon explores Toni Morrison's widespread engagement with ancient Greek and Roman tradition. Discussing all ten of her published novels to date, Roynon examines the ways in which classical myth, literature, history, social practice, and religious ritual make their presence felt in Morrison's writing. Combining original and detailed close readings with broader theoretical discussion, she argues that Morrison's classical allusiveness is characterized by a strategic ambivalence. Adopting a thematic, rather than novel-by-novel approach, Roynon demonstrates that Morrison's classicism is fundamental to the transformative critique of American history and culture that her work effects. Building on recent developments in race theory, transnational studies, and Classical Reception studies, the volume positions Morrison within a genealogy of intellectuals who have challenged the purported conservative nature of Greek and Roman tradition, and who have revealed its construction as a 'white' or pure and purifying force to be a fabrication of the Enlightenment. Exploring the ways in which Morrison's dialogue with Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, and Ovid relates to her simultaneous dialogue with many other American literary forebears - from Cotton Mather to Willa Cather, or from Pauline Hopkins to F.Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner - Roynon shows that Morrison's classicism enables her to fulfil her own imperative that 'the past has to be revised'.

The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

The story of Cupid and Psyche is first known through the Latin novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by the second-century AD writer Apuleius—one of the few Latin fictions from Roman antiquity to have survived in its entirety. Apuleius in European Literature: Cupid and Psyche since 1650 examines the reception of the long two-book romantic story of Cupid and Psyche in European literature from 1650 to the present day, with some attention also devoted to fine art and opera across this period. Stephen Harrison and Regine May argue that Cupid and Psyche had a broad and profound influence on certain important and specific areas of European culture; it was appropriated and adapted to suit particular cultural and generic contexts, especially the development of the fairy tale. This constitutes an important strand of the more general reception of the ancient novel, since the tale of Cupid and Psyche is arguably the most famous section of any fiction from Greece or Rome. Apuleius' story has enjoyed an extraordinarily rich reception throughout the five centuries from its rediscovery in the Renaissance to the present day. Previous studies of this reception have focused on the tale's prominence in Renaissance art and literature, or otherwise on its status in the German Romantic period. This book goes further and wider, ranging across literary genres in English, French, German and Dutch, encompassing poetry and drama as well as prose fiction, and covering all the key elements of the tale's reception from 1650 to the present. We hereby rediscover a tale that today remains as relevant and ripe for appropriation as ever.

The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy presents fifteen all-new essays on how fantasy draws on ancient Greek and Roman mythology, philosophy, literature, history, art, and cult practice.