Classicising Crisis (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies)

Geopolitical shifts and economic shocks, from the Early Modern period to the 21st century, are frequently represented in terms of classical antecedents. In this book, an international team of contributors - working across the disciplines of Classics, History, Politics, and English - addresses a range of revolutionary transformations, in England, America, France, Haiti, Greece, Italy, Russia, Germany, and a recently globalised world, all of which were accorded the classical treatment.

The chapters investigate discrete cases of classicising crisis, while the Introduction highlights patterns among them. The book asks: are classical equations a prized ideal, when evidence warrants, or linkages forced by an implacable will to power, or good faith attempts to make sense of events otherwise bafflingly unfamiliar and dangerous? Finally, do the events thus classicised retain, even increase, their power to disturb and energise, or are they ultimately contained?

Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire is essential reading for students and scholars of classics, classical reception, and political thought in Europe and the Americas.

Barbara Goff is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading, UK. She is the author of Your Secret Language: Classics in the British Colonies of West Africa (2013). With Michael Simpson she is co-author of Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone and Dramas of the African Diaspora (2007) and co-editor of Thinking the Olympics: the Classical Tradition and the Modern Games (2011).

Michael Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is currently completing a single-authored book titled Lost Plots: Romanticism and the Distractions of Reading, and is collaborating with Barbara Goff on a major project called Working Classics: Greece, Rome, and the British Labour Movement.