Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989

by Justine McConnell (Editor), Edith Hall (Editor)

Overview

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns.

Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand's foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472579393
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/02/2016
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King's College London, and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, UK. She has published more than twenty books on ancient Greek culture and its reception including The Return of Ulysses (2008), Greek Tragedy(2010), Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (2013) and Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2015).

Justine McConnell is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013), and co-editor of Ancient Slavery and Abolition: from Hobbes to Hollywood (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015).
Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King's College London, UK. She is author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013) and, with Fiona Macintosh, Performing Epic or Telling Tales (2020), and has co-edited four books on the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity.
Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at the University of Durham and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, UK. Her books on ancient Greek culture and its reception include The Return of Ulysses (2008), Greek Tragedy (2010), Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (2013) and Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2015).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors

Introduction, Justine McConnell

1 From Anthropophagy to Allegory and Back: A Study of
Classical Myth and the Brazilian Novel, Patrice Rankine
2 Ibrahim Al-Koni's Lost Oasis as Atlantis and His Demon as
Typhon, William M. Hutchins
3 Greek Myth and Mythmaking in Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch
and The Dream Swimmer, Simon Perris
4 War, Religion and Tragedy: The Revolt of the Muckers in
Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil's Videiras de Cristal,
Sofia Frade
5 Translating Myths, Translating Fictions, Lorna Hardwick
6 Echoes of Ancient Greek Myths in Murakami Haruki's
novels and in Other Works of Contemporary Japanese
Literature, Giorgio Amitrano
7 'It's All in the Game': Greek Myth and The Wire, Adam Ganz
8 Writing a New Irish Odyssey: Theresa Kishkan's A Man in
a Distant Field, Fiona Macintosh
9 The Minotaur on the Russian Internet: Viktor Pelevin's
Helmet of Horror, Anna Ljunggren
10 Diagnosis: Overdose – Status: Critical. Odysseys in
Bernhard Schlink's Die Heimkehr, Sebastian Matzner
11 Narcissus and the Furies: Myth and Docufiction in
Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, Edith Hall
12 Philhellenic Imperialism and the Invention of the Classical
Past: Twenty-first Century Re-imaginings
of Odysseus in the Greek War for Independence, Efrossini Spentzou
13 The 'Poem of Force' in Australia: David Malouf, Ransom and Chloe
Hooper, The Tall Man, Margaret Reynolds
14 Young Female Heroes from Sophocles to the Twenty-First
Century, Helen Eastman
15 Generation Telemachus: Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read
the Air, Justine McConnell