Leading and emerging, early career scholars in Classical Reception Studies come together in this volume to explore the under-represented area of the Australasian Classical Tradition. They interrogate the interactions between Mediterranean Antiquity and the antipodean worlds of New Zealand and Australia through the lenses of literature, film, theatre and fine art. Of interest to scholars across the globe who research the influence of antiquity on modern literature, film, theatre and fine art, this volume fills a decisive gap in the literature by bringing antipodean research into the spotlight. Following a contextual introduction to the field, the six parts of the volume explore the latest research on subjects that range from the Lord of the Rings and Xena: Warrior Princess franchises to important artists such as Sidney Nolan and local authors whose work offers opportunities for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis with well-known Western authors and artists.
Leading and emerging, early career scholars in Classical Reception Studies come together in this volume to explore the under-represented area of the Australasian Classical Tradition. They interrogate the interactions between Mediterranean Antiquity and the antipodean worlds of New Zealand and Australia through the lenses of literature, film, theatre and fine art. Of interest to scholars across the globe who research the influence of antiquity on modern literature, film, theatre and fine art, this volume fills a decisive gap in the literature by bringing antipodean research into the spotlight. Following a contextual introduction to the field, the six parts of the volume explore the latest research on subjects that range from the Lord of the Rings and Xena: Warrior Princess franchises to important artists such as Sidney Nolan and local authors whose work offers opportunities for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis with well-known Western authors and artists.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction (Marguerite Johnson, University of Newcastle,
Australia)
Part 1: The Colonial Past – Classical Influences in White
Australasia
1. Marguerite Johnson (University of Newcastle, Australia): Black
Out: Classicizing Indigeneity in Australia and New Zealand
2. Rachael White (University of Oxford, UK): Australia as
Underworld: Convict Classics in the Nineteenth Century
Part 2: Theatre – Then and Now
3. Laura Ginters (University of Sydney, Australia): Agamemnon comes
to the Antipodes: The Origins of Student Drama at the University of
Sydney
4. John Davidson (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand):
Salamis and Gallipoli: The Campaigns of Phillip Mann
5. Michael Ewans (University of Newcastle, Australia) and
Marguerite Johnson (University of Newcastle, Australia): Wesley
Enoch's Black Medea
6. Jane Montgomery Griffiths (Monash University, Australia): What
Women Critics Know that Men Don't
Part 3: Poetry and Classical Echoes in New Zealand
7. Geoffrey Miles (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand):
James K. Baxter and the Gorgon Moon
8. Anna Jackson (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand):
Clodia Through the Looking Glass
Part 4: Fictionalizing Antipodean Antiquities
9. Nicolas Liney (University of Oxford, UK): Parilia Poscor - David
Malouf Remembers the Parilia (Fasti 4.721)
10. Elizabeth Hale (University of New England, Australia):
Imaginative Displacement: Classical Reception in the Young Adult
Fiction of Margaret Mahy
11. Babette Pütz (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand):
Classical Influences in Bernard Beckett's Genesis, August, and
Lullaby
12. Anne Rogerson (University of Sydney, Australia): Displaced
Persons and Displaced Narratives in S. D. Gentill's Hero
Trilogy
Part 5: Australasia, Greece and Rome - Paper and Canvas
13. Sarah Midford (La Trobe University, Australia): Painting Anzacs
in an Epic Landscape: Greek Myth, the Trojan War and Sidney Nolan’s
Gallipoli Series
14. Melinda Johnston (independent scholar) and Thomas Köntges
(University of Leipzig, Germany): Of Heroes and Humans: Marian
Maguire's Colonization of Herakles' Mythical World
Part 6: Antiquity on the Australasian Screen
15. Ika Willis (University of Wollongong, Australia): Temporal
Turbulence: Reception Studies(') Now
16. Hannah Parry (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand):
Classical Epic in Peter Jackson's Middle-Earth Trilogies
17. Leanne Glass (University of Newcastle, Australia): Shifting
Paradigms in Ben Ferris’ Penelope
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The first national/international collection of essays covering Classical Reception in Australian and New Zealand literature, film, theatre and fine art from 1886 to the present day.
Marguerite Johnson is Professor of Classics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Ovid on Cosmetics (Bloomsbury, 2015), co-editor (with Harold Tarrant) of Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator (Bloomsbury, 2012) and co-author (with Terry Ryan) of Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature: A Sourcebook (2005).
This is a timely book, given current debates about teaching
‘western civilisation’ in our universities. It represents a
coming-of-age particularly in Australian classical reception
studies, and it will surely be a stimulus to bring less descriptive
and more theoretically innovative approaches to bear on the myriad
forms of classical reception that saturate Australasia.
*The Classical Review*
Marguerite Johnson has curated a formidable and impressively
diverse collection of essays … The volume showcases a rich variety
of theoretical and methodological approaches, and has the added
benefit of presenting familiar classical materials in distinctly
unfamiliar contexts, replete with their own unique social and
cultural pressures and local systems of scholarship.
*Greece & Rome*
A well-rounded study highlighting the importance of Greco-Roman
history and culture for many Australians and New Zealanders, from
convicts to colonisers, ranging from novelists to poets to painters
and film-makers. This is exemplary Classical Reception
practice.
*Maxine Lewis, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, University
of Auckland, New Zealand*
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