Reception and the Classics : An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition

This collection brings together leading experts in a number of fields of the humanities to offer a new perspective on the classical tradition. Drawing on reception studies, philology and early modern studies, the essays explore the interaction between literary criticism and the multiple cultural contexts in which texts were produced, discovered, appropriated and translated. The intersection of Realpolitik and textual criticism, poetic and musical aesthetics, and authority and self-fashioning all come under scrutiny. The canonical Latin writers and their subsequent reception form the backbone of the volume, with a focus on the European Renaissance. It thus marks a reconnection between classical and early modern studies and the concomitant rapprochement of philological and cultural historical approaches to texts and other works of art. This book will be of interest to scholars in classics, Renaissance studies, comparative literature, English, Italian and art history.

William Brockliss is currently completing his PhD at Yale University, Connecticut. For his dissertation, he has been studying the relationship between the metaphorical associations of flowers in Homeric poetry and the characteristics of flora in the Greek natural environment. In the future, he intends to develop his studies of metaphoricity by exploring the contrasting treatments of everyday metaphor in Greek poetry and philosophy.

Pramit Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin. He specializes in the Latin poetry of the early Roman empire, set within a broader study of classical epic and tragedy. His current work explores literary depictions of 'theomachy' (conflicts between humans and gods) and their mediation of issues such as religious conflict, philosophical iconoclasm, political struggle and poetic rivalry. He also studies the reception of classical antiquity in early modern epic and tragedy and in Renaissance art.

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin. She specializes in the political culture and historiography of the Roman Republic, with a particular focus on the conjunction of literary technique and historical subject matter. Her current work includes a book-length study of the construction and experience of political authority in the Republic, focusing especially on Livy and Cicero. She has also published on intertextuality and source criticism in Livy.

Katherine Wasdin currently teaches at The George Washington University, Washington DC. Her work focuses on imperial Latin poetry, with a particular emphasis on minor and occasional genres. She is currently working on a diachronic study of the use of shared poetic language and tropes in erotic and nuptial verse in Greek and Latin poetry from Sappho to Claudian, exploring how and why these types of poetry borrow from each other to express ideas of union, desire and community. She also has interests in Archaic Greek poetry and the reception of antiquity in contemporary literature.