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The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. This fifth and final volume in the series covers the years from 1880 onwards.
List of contents
- Frontmatter
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1: Kenneth Haynes: Introduction: Classical Reception in English Literature after 1880 - The Modern Spiritual Practice of Antiquity
- 2: Isobel Hurst: Classics in Education after 1880
- 3: Stephanie Nelson: Classics in Translation after 1880
- 4: Elizabeth Prettejohn: Pater and the Classics
- 5: Stefano Evangelista: Decadence and the Classical Tradition
- 6: Andrew Radford: Hardy, Gissing, and Kipling
- 7: Elizabeth Vandiver: Classics, Empire, and War
- 8: Cathy Gere: Myth and Ritual
- 9: P. Th. M. G. Liebregts: W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot
- 10: Terry Gifford: Changing Ideas of Pastoral
- 11: J. H. D. Scourfield: Forster and Woolf
- 12: Ron Bush: Ulysses: Joyce's Museum of Homers
- 13: P. Th. M. G. Liebregts: Ezra Pound
- 14: Fiona Macintosh: 'Euripides Our Contemporary': Dialogues between Shakespeare and the Greeks
- 15: David Wray: 'Learned Poetry' and the Classics: Three Case Studies
- 16: John Talbot: Auden and Lowell at the End of the Classics
- 17: Andre Furlani: Postwar North American Classics
- 18: Stephen Harrison: Classics and Poetry in England after 1960
- 19: Florence Impens: Classics and Irish Poetry after 1960
- 20: Kenneth Haynes: Eccentric Classics: The Fiction of Guy Davenport
- 21: Emily Greenwood: Subaltern Classics in Anti- and Post-Colonial Literatures in English
- Classical Reception in English Literature, after 1880: A Bibliography
- Endmatter
- Index
About the author
Kenneth Haynes is Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at Brown University. One of his major areas of study is classical reception in European literature and he has previously co-edited The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790-1900 (OUP, 2006) and authored the monograph English Literature and Ancient Languages (OUP, 2003). He also works on translation history, the reception of philosophical texts, and twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry.
Summary
The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes.
OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context.
This fifth and final volume in the series, and the last to appear, covers the years from 1880 onwards. Written by leading scholars in such diverse fields as classics, English literature, history, and comparative literature, the chapters provide insights into the role of classical literature in education, translation, and notions of empire, as well as engaging with the works of major writers, including Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney. Besides being an indispensable reference tool, the volume as a whole presents an absorbing history of a complex period which saw the end of the traditional role played by classics in literary education as well as the end of traditional processes of literary canon formation, offering a new map of the terrain and a glimpse at the shape which the reception of antiquity may come to take in the twenty-first century.
