Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform

Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform PDF Author: Henry Stead
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472584287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform presents an original and carefully argued case for the importance of classical ideas, education and self-education in the personal development and activities of British social reformers in the 19th and first six decades of the 20th century. Usually drawn from the lower echelons of the middle class and the most aspirational artisanal and working-class circles, the prominent reformers, revolutionaries, feminists and educationalists of this era, far from regarding education in Latin and Greek as the preserve of the upper classes and inherently reactionary, were consistently inspired by the Mediterranean Classics and contested the monopoly on access to them often claimed by the wealthy and aristocratic elite. The essays, several of which draw on previously neglected and unpublished sources, cover literary figures (Coleridge, the 'Cockney Classicist' poets including Keats, and Dickens), different cultural media (burlesque theatre, body-building, banner art, poetry, journalism and fiction), topics in social reform (the desirability of revolution, suffrage, poverty, social exclusion, women's rights, healthcare, eugenics, town planning, race relations and workers' education), as well as political affiliations and agencies (Chartists, Trade Unions, the WEA, political parties including the Fabians, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Labour Party). The sixteen essays in this volume restore to the history of British Classics some of the subject's ideological complexity and instrumentality in social progress, a past which is badly needed in the current debates over the future of the discipline. Contributors include specialists in English Literature, History, Classics and Art.

Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform

Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform PDF Author: Henry Stead
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472584287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform presents an original and carefully argued case for the importance of classical ideas, education and self-education in the personal development and activities of British social reformers in the 19th and first six decades of the 20th century. Usually drawn from the lower echelons of the middle class and the most aspirational artisanal and working-class circles, the prominent reformers, revolutionaries, feminists and educationalists of this era, far from regarding education in Latin and Greek as the preserve of the upper classes and inherently reactionary, were consistently inspired by the Mediterranean Classics and contested the monopoly on access to them often claimed by the wealthy and aristocratic elite. The essays, several of which draw on previously neglected and unpublished sources, cover literary figures (Coleridge, the 'Cockney Classicist' poets including Keats, and Dickens), different cultural media (burlesque theatre, body-building, banner art, poetry, journalism and fiction), topics in social reform (the desirability of revolution, suffrage, poverty, social exclusion, women's rights, healthcare, eugenics, town planning, race relations and workers' education), as well as political affiliations and agencies (Chartists, Trade Unions, the WEA, political parties including the Fabians, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Labour Party). The sixteen essays in this volume restore to the history of British Classics some of the subject's ideological complexity and instrumentality in social progress, a past which is badly needed in the current debates over the future of the discipline. Contributors include specialists in English Literature, History, Classics and Art.

A People's History of Classics

A People's History of Classics PDF Author: Edith Hall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315446588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
A People’s History of Classics explores the influence of the classical past on the lives of working-class people, whose voices have been almost completely excluded from previous histories of classical scholarship and pedagogy, in Britain and Ireland from the late 17th to the early 20th century. This volume challenges the prevailing scholarly and public assumption that the intimate link between the exclusive intellectual culture of British elites and the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages meant that working-class culture was a ‘Classics-Free Zone’. Making use of diverse sources of information, both published and unpublished, in archives, museums and libraries across the United Kingdom and Ireland, Hall and Stead examine the working-class experience of classical culture from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the outbreak of World War II. They analyse a huge volume of data, from individuals, groups, regions and activities, in a huge range of sources including memoirs, autobiographies, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, artefacts and documents in regional museums. This allows a deeper understanding not only of the many examples of interaction with the Classics, but also what these cultural interactions signified to the working poor: from the promise of social advancement, to propaganda exploited by the elites, to covert and overt class war. A People’s History of Classics offers a fascinating and insightful exploration of the many and varied engagements with Greece and Rome among the working classes in Britain and Ireland, and is a must-read not only for classicists, but also for students of British and Irish social, intellectual and political history in this period. Further, it brings new historical depth and perspectives to public debates around the future of classical education, and should be read by anyone with an interest in educational policy in Britain today.

Tony Harrison and the Classics

Tony Harrison and the Classics PDF Author: Sandie Byrne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192605259
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Tony Harrison and the Classics comprises fifteen chapters examining the lasting importance of Tony Harrison's classical education, the extent of the influence of Greek and Roman texts on his subjects, themes, and styles, his contribution to knowledge and understanding of classical literature, his popularization of classical works, and his innovative treatment of classical drama in plays which have been performed globally. Harrison's work fosters debates about the role and perception of the classics and adaptations of classical literature in relation to education, 'high' and 'popular' culture, accessibility, and reception. A unifying theme of the collection is the way in which Harrison finds in classical literature fruitful matter for the articulation and dramatization of his longstanding preoccupations: language, class, access to art, and the causes and effects of war. Through his adaptations and translations, Harrison uses classical drama to stage interventions in modern politics, but neither idealizes nor romanticizes the ancient world, depicting inequality, bigotry, greed, and brutality.

The Classics in Modernist Translation

The Classics in Modernist Translation PDF Author: Lynn Kozak
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350040967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This volume sheds new light on a wealth of early 20th-century engagement with literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity that significantly shaped the work of anglophone literary modernism. The essays spotlight 'translation,' a concept the modernists themselves used to reckon with the Classics and to denote a range of different kinds of reception – from more literal to more liberal translation work, as well as forms of what contemporary reception studies would term 'adaptation', 'refiguration' and 'intervention.' As the volume's essays reveal, modernist 'translations' of Classical texts crucially informed the innovations of many modernists and often themselves constituted modernist literary projects. Thus the volume responds to gaps in both Classical reception and Modernist studies: essays treat a comparatively understudied area in Classical reception by reviving work in a subfield of Modernist studies relatively inactive in recent decades but enjoying renewed attention through the recent work of contributors to this volume. The volume's essays address work significantly informed by Classical materials, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Ovid, and Propertius, and approach a range of modernist writers: Pound and H.D., among the modernists best known for work engaging the Classics, as well as Cummings, Eliot, Joyce, Laura Riding, and Yeats.

Anne Carson: Antiquity

Anne Carson: Antiquity PDF Author: Laura Jansen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350174777
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
From her seminal Eros the Bittersweet (1986) to her experimental Float (2016), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), Anne Carson's engagement with antiquity has been deeply influential to generations of readers, both inside and outside of academia. One reason for her success is the versatile scope of her classically-oriented oeuvre, which she rethinks across multiple media and categories. Yet an equally significant reason is her profile as a classicist. In this role, Carson unfailingly refuses to conform to the established conventions and situated practices of her discipline, in favour of a mode of reading classical literature that allows for interpretative and creative freedom. From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary perspective, the volume explores the erudite indiscipline of Carson's classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. It argues that her classicism is irreducible to a single vision, and that it is best approached as integral to the protean character of her artistic thought. Anne Carson/Antiquity collects twenty essays by poets, translators, artists, practitioners and scholars. It offers the first collective study of the author's classicism, while drawing attention to one of the most avant-garde, multifaceted readings of the classical past.

Dionysus after Nietzsche

Dionysus after Nietzsche PDF Author: Adam Lecznar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108482562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Explores how, after Nietzsche, Dionysus and the ancient Greeks would never be the same again.

Troy, Carthage and the Victorians

Troy, Carthage and the Victorians PDF Author: Rachel Bryant Davies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110813680X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Playful, popular visions of Troy and Carthage, backdrops to the Iliad and Aeneid's epic narratives, shine the spotlight on antiquity's starring role in nineteenth-century culture. This is the story of how these ruined cities inspired bold reconstructions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, how archaeological discoveries in the Troad and North Africa sparked dramatic debates, and how their ruins were exploited to conceptualise problematic relationships between past, present and future. Rachel Bryant Davies breaks new ground in the afterlife of classical antiquity by revealing more complex and less constrained interaction with classical knowledge across a broader social spectrum than yet understood, drawing upon methodological developments from disciplines such as history of science and theatre history in order to do so. She also develops a thorough critical framework for understanding classical burlesque and engages in in-depth analysis of a toy-theatre production.

Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen

Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen PDF Author: Lorna Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198907133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley all died in the First Word War. They came from diverse social, educational, and cultural backgrounds, but for all of the writers, engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity was decisive in shaping their war poetry. The world views and cultural hinterlands of Brooke and Sorley were framed by the Greek and Latin texts they had studied at school, whereas for Owen, who struggled with Latin, classical texts were a part of his aspirational literary imagination. Rosenberg's education was limited but he encountered some Greek and Roman literature through translations, and through mediations in English literature. The various ways in which the poets engaged with classical literature are analysed in the commentaries, which are designed to be accessible to classicists and to users from other subject areas. The extensive range of connections made by the poets and by subsequent readers is explained in the Introduction to the volume. The commentaries illuminate relationships between the poems and attitudes to the war at the time, in the immediate post-war years, and subsequently. They also probe how individual poems reveal various facets of the poetry of unease, the poetry of survival, and the poetics of war and ecology. References to the accompanying online Oxford Classical Receptions Commentaries will enable readers to follow up their special interests. This volume differs from the shorter volume Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry: Making Connections in that it covers the whole output of the four poets, and not just their war poems.

Gender, Creation Myths and their Reception in Western Civilization

Gender, Creation Myths and their Reception in Western Civilization PDF Author: Lisa Maurice
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350212849
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This volume offers an instructive comparative perspective on the Judaic, Christian, Greek and Roman myths about the creation of humans in relation to each other, as well as a broad overview of their enduring relevance in the modern Western world and its conceptions of gender and identity. Taking the idea that the way in which a society regards humanity, and especially the roots of humanity, is crucial to an understanding of that society, it presents the different models for the creation and nature of mankind, and their changing receptions over a range of periods and places. It thereby demonstrates that the myths reflect fundamental continuities, evolutions and developments across cultures and societies: in no context are these more apparent than with regard to gender. Chapters explore the role of gender in Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian creation myths and their reception traditions, demonstrating how perceptions of 'male' and 'female' dating back to antiquity have become embedded in, and significantly influenced, subsequent perceptions of gender roles. Focusing on the figures of Prometheus, Pandora, Adam and Eve and their instantiations in a broad range of narratives and media from antiquity to the present day, they examine how variations on these myths reflect the concerns of the societies producing them and the malleability of the stories as they are recast to fit different contexts and different audiences.

Women Classical Scholars

Women Classical Scholars PDF Author: Rosie Wyles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198725205
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
La 4e de couverture indique : "the first written history of the pioneering women born between the Renaissance and 1913 who played significant roles in the history of classical scholarship."