Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions and World Literature

Featuring leading scholars in their fields, this book examines receptions of ancient and early modern literary works from around the world (China, Japan, Ancient Maya, Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient India, Ancient Mesopotamia) that have circulated globally across time and space (from East to West, North to South, South to West). Beginning with the premise of an enduring and revered cultural past, the essays go on to show how the circulation of literature through translation and other forms of reception in fact long predates modern global society; the idea of national literary canons have existed just over a hundred years and emerged with the idea of national educational curricula. Highlighting the relationship of culture and politics in which canons are created, translated, promulgated, and preserved, this book argues that such nationally-defined curricula were challenged by critics and writers in the wake of the Second World War. 

Brenda Deen Schildgen is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, USA. The author of more than fifty articles focused on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as Chaucer, Augustine, and biblical hermeneutics, her most recent books include Divine Providence, A History: Bible, Virgil, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante; Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe; and Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature.

Ralph Hexter is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Caliornia, Davis, USA, where he also serves as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. He has published on Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the reception of Ovid, and the intersections of the history of scholarship and sexuality.