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The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects. This volume explores the reception of classical antiquity in childhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in Britain and the United States, focusing on myth and historical fiction in particular.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- 0: Introduction
- 1: "Very Capital Reading for Children": Hawthorne, Kingsley, and the Transformation of Myth into Children's Literature
- 2: Classics in their Own Right: Visions and Revisions of Hawthorne and Kingsley
- 3: "Steeped in Greek Mythology": The First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 4: "Be a Roman Soldier": History, Historical Fiction, and National Identity
- 5: Ancient History for Girls
- 6: The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults
- 7: Pan in the Alps: Child and Adult in H.D.'s The Hedgehog
- 8: Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Sheila Murnaghan earned an AB from Harvard University, a BA from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina. She taught at Yale University from 1979 until 1990, then moved to the University of Pennsylvania where she is currently the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek. Her research focuses on ancient Greek epic and tragedy, gender in classical culture, and classical reception, especially in the twentieth century. She is the author of Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (2nd ed.; Lexington Books, 2011), and the co-editor of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (Routledge, 1998; with Sandra R. Joshel), Odyssean Identities In Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (Ohio State University Press, 2014; with Hunter Gardner), and Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition (Ohio State University Press, 2018; with Ralph M. Rosen).
Deborah H. Roberts has a BA from Swarthmore College, an MA from Stanford University, and a PhD from Yale University. She is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College, where she has taught since 1977. Her research has been primarily concerned with Greek tragedy, classical reception, and translation studies, with a focus on the translation of Greek tragedy and of Greek and Latin texts once held to require expurgation. She is the author of Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), co-editor of Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton University Press, 1997; with Francis M. Dunn and Don Fowler), and translator of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (Hackett, 2012) and Euripides' Ion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and Andromache (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Summary
The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects. This volume explores the reception of classical antiquity in childhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in Britain and the United States, focusing on myth and historical fiction in particular.
