The Reception Of Ancient Virtues And Vices In Modern Popular Culture

In Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture, Eran Almagor and Lisa Maurice offer a collection of chapters dealing with the reception of antiquity in modern popular media, and focusing on a comparison between ancient and modern sets of values.

This volume offers an instructive comparative perspective on the Judaic, Christian, Greek and Roman myths about the creation of humans in relation to each other, as well as a broad overview of their enduring relevance in the modern Western world and its conceptions of gender and identity. Taking the idea that the way in which a society regards humanity, and especially the roots of humanity, is crucial to an understanding of that society, it presents the different models for the creation and nature of mankind, and their changing receptions over a range of periods and places. It thereby demonstrates that the myths reflect fundamental continuities, evolutions and developments across cultures and societies: in no context are these more apparent than with regard to gender. Chapters explore the role of gender in Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian creation myths and their reception traditions, demonstrating how perceptions of 'male' and 'female' dating back to antiquity have become embedded in, and significantly influenced, subsequent perceptions of gender roles. Focusing on the figures of Prometheus, Pandora, Adam and Eve and their instantiations in a broad range of narratives and media from antiquity to the present day, they examine how variations on these myths reflect the concerns of the societies producing them and the malleability of the stories as they are recast to fit different contexts and different audiences.

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.

The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles investigates the varying receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome in children’s literature, covering the genres of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery stories and classical mythology, and considering the ideological manipulations in these works.

Rewriting the Ancient World looks at how and why the ancient world, including not only the Greeks and Romans, but also Jews and Christians, has been rewritten in popular fictions of the modern world.

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plutarch offers the first comprehensive analysis of Plutarch’s rich reception history from the high Roman Empire, Late Antiquity and Byzantium to the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the modern era, across various cultures in Europe, America, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Reception studies have transformed the classics. Many more literary and cultural texts are now regarded as 'valid' for classical study. And within this process of widening, children's literature has in its turn emerged as being increasingly important. Books written for children now comprise one of the largest and most prominent bodies of texts to engage with the classical world, with an audience that constantly changes as it grows up. This innovative volume wrestles with that very characteristic of change which is so fundamental to children's literature, showing how significant the classics, as well as classically-inspired fiction and verse, have been in tackling the adolescent challenges posed by metamorphosis. Chapters address such themes as the use made by C S Lewis, in The Horse and his Boy, of Apuleius' The Golden Ass; how Ovidian myth frames the Narnia stories; classical 'nonsense' in Edward Lear; Pan as a powerful symbol of change in children's literature, for instance in The Wind in the Willows; the transformative power of the Orpheus myth; and how works for children have handled the teaching of the classics.

This volume constitutes the first large-scale collaborative reflection on Xenophon’s Anabasis, gathering experts on Greek historiography and Xenophon. It is structured in three sections: the first section provides a linear reading of the Anabasis through chapters on select episodes (from Book 1 through Book 7), including the opening, Cyrus’ characterisation, the meeting of Socrates and Xenophon, Xenophon’s leadership, the marches through Armenia and along the Black Sea coast and the service under Seuthes in Thrace. The second section offers an in-depth exploration of hitherto overlooked recurrent themes. Based on new approaches and scholarly trends, it focuses on topics such as the concept of friendship, the speeches of characters other than Xenophon, the suffering of the human body, the role of rumour and misrepresentation, and the depiction of emotions. The third section offers a more thorough investigation of the manifold reception of this work (in Antiquity, Byzantium, Renaissance, modern period, in cinema studies and illustrations). Finally, in acknowledgement of the Anabasis’ long history as a pedagogical text, the volume contains an envoi on the importance and benefits of teaching Xenophon and the Anabasis, more specifically.