Classical Allusions Research Articles

“My tree stays tree”: Sylvia Plath and Ovid’s Daphne

Critical appraisals of Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre remain dominated by psychoanalytic readings that conflate the writer’s life and work. Poems such as ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ are presented as emblematic of what is perceived to be Plath’s autobiographical identification with -- and self-positioning in her work as -- Electra-mourning- Agamemnon (Plath’s father, Otto, died of complications related to untreated diabetes shortly after her eighth birthday). One consequence of this biographical bias is that when the presence of classical allusion in her work is noted, scholarly focus falls on Plath’s brief references to Greek tragedy. Within this critically-constructed biographical matrix comprising Plath, her father, and the classics, however, is the little-noted fact that it was Otto who first introduced Sylvia to Latin. This essay re-focalizes discussions of Plath’s classicism around her literary engagement with Latin literature and with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular. I focus on Plath’s engagement with the tale of Daphne across five of her poems: ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad’, ‘On a Plethora of Dryads’, ‘Pursuit’, ‘Virgin in a Tree’, and ‘Elm’, and I explore her poetic responses to the allegorical and thematic possibilities suggested by the tale to her as a woman artist in the 1950s. Using Ovidian myth to speak of contemporary women’s lives, Plath engages with the tale in a search for artistic and sexual independence. In conclusion, I argue that Ovid’s tale of Daphne is as programmatic for the themes of Plath’s poetry as it is for the Roman poet’s epic text.

Derek Walcott discusses his painting and poetry

Derek Walcott (1930-2017), Caribbean poet and playwright, wrote, among many other works, the play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) and the epic Omeros (1990). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. Walcott’s writing revolves around the West Indies, its national identity and European heritage, the theme of exile and betrayal, in a rich blend of verse, prose, Creole and English, filled with classical allusions as well as calypso rhythm. Donald Friedman recorded him in 2003. Below...

New Frontiers of Electronic Textual Research in the Humanities: Investigating Classical Allusions in Chinese Poetry through Digital Methods

Abstract By investigating two literary allusions, chuzhi 蜍志 and lüdai 呂袋, found in poems from the Ming-Qing period, this article seeks to discover new ways to combine traditional philological techniques and digital research methodologies in the study of Chinese literature. The article illustrates several procedures through which scholars today can use digitized versions of large compendia such as the Peiwen yunfu 佩文韻府 (Thesaurus Arranged by Rhymes) to efficiently and rapidly find solutions to their questions regarding obscure historical or literary references. In addition, through a thorough study of one of the poems composed by Yiquan 宜泉, a close friend of Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, and an individual called “Fourth Brother Li” that the poem was dedicated to, this article also shows the special power of electronic textual research to analyze the different ways social networks were formed and how they functioned during this era.

Creating a shared past: The representation of Medici–Habsburg relations in the wedding celebrations for Eleonora de Toledo and Cosimo I de’ Medici

AbstractIn the summer of 1539, an elaborate, ephemeral programme of decoration was constructed in Florence to celebrate the wedding of Cosimo I de' Medici and Eleonora Álvarez de Toledo. Through an interplay of painting, sculpture, heraldry, and classical allusions, the programme constructed a narrative of the marriage as the culmination of a history of mutual support between the Medici family and the Spanish monarchy. In so doing, this article argues, it revealed the dynamic by which the network of political alliances and exchanges that made Spanish hegemony on the Italian peninsula possible operated. The narrative re‐presented the distant and recent history of Medici–Spanish relations and re‐created Florence as a middle ground between Spanish imperialism and Italian resistance and autonomy. It revealed the way in which Spanish Habsburg hegemony in Italy relied on dialogue, accommodation, mutual reciprocity, and a creative interpretation of the past and present.

Naming Milton's Eve

The present article explores Paradise Lost's fixing on the identity of the first woman, as given and found in her name, from Adam's and God's initial, “quasi-baptismal” speech-acts, to Eve's analogization to legendary fallen or vanquished females, heroes, and heroines, to Eve's name in relation to both the Miltonic Fall-motif of woe and the word “live” in Paradise Lost. If classical allusions and received literary motifs seem to draw Eve into a fatal past, or to anticipate a tragic or doomed future, Milton also makes clear that “reason is also choice,” and we must suspend disbelief in foregone conclusions—that is, in favor of free will—until Adam and Eve have reasoned about (and made) their own fatal choices.

Elements of Classical Allusion in The Waste Land, Part V

Parallels have often been drawn between The Waste Land and the Aeneid, as well as with various other classical works,1 but the extent of the subtle classical allusions in Part V has not been fully ...

Far from the Tree: Choreographies of Family Obligation in the Ballet of Frankenstein

Far from the Tree: Choreographies of Family Obligation in the Ballet of Frankenstein Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (bio) Their stories point a way for all of us to expand our definitions of the human family. Intimacy with difference fosters its accommodation. —Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree Frankenstein is, like many canonical literary works, generative, traveling across time, place, and form as it is adapted to the various uses of literary narrative in the Western tradition. A story that addresses such deep human truths as Frankenstein travels extravagantly across adaptations ranging from horror movies, Halloween costumes, campy comedy, advertising, academic conferences, and now to a ballet. The dramatic story of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature extends its literary pedigree through the story of its own creation. Authored by the daughter of two famous Enlightenment intellectuals and political theorists who defined the Western liberal tradition, Frankenstein emanates from a young woman writer entangled in a semi-scandalous, theatrical liaison with one of the leading poets of nineteenth-century English Romanticism. The elaborate Gothic tale emerges from a parlor game among the avant-garde literati of the time, including the infamous Lord Byron, cooped up restlessly together on a dark and stormy night in a villa on Lake Geneva at the dawn of the European scientific revolution. Further securing Frankenstein’s narrative prestige is its gush of classical allusions, from its subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” to Ovid, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible. [End Page 464] The genre of classical ballet fits the intellectual and aesthetic aristocracy that surround the novel’s inception and the ample allusions to the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment to which the author of this story, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, was the unlikely heiress. Unlike many of the popularizations and adaptations of Frankenstein in the twentieth century—ranging across the genres of grotesque, horror, supernatural, pop, and parody—the classical ballet adaptation of the novel fits well with the elite allusions and the intellectual interests of the circle surrounding its romantic launch. Shelley’s Frankenstein reaches toward high art through a classically arranged, costumed, and staged ballet version choreographed by Liam Scarlett and performed by the Royal Ballet in 2016 and the San Francisco Ballet in 2017 and 2018.1 The Meaning-Making Possibilities of Adaptation My purpose here is threefold: first, to show what meanings emerge from the story of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature through the adaptation from novel to ballet; second, to explicate how the ballet carries story through the gestural expressive forms of classical and modern dance; and third, to offer a bioethical reading of the Frankenstein ballet as a cautionary tale about the precariousness of familial attachments when the usual expectations and familiar patterns of procreation are disturbed. The adaptation from novel to ballet, from one aesthetic genre to another, enables a story about the proper and improper relations and mutual obligations between parent and child to emerge with clarity, economy, and strength. The expressive possibilities of the dance form intensify and concentrate the Frankenstein family drama, transforming Shelley’s narratively complex Gothic plot into a succinct, stylized performance that embodies character and familial interrelations in ways the novel form and many of the subsequent adaptations obscure. A story about the ethics of family obligation materializes as Shelley’s multiple plotlines, settings, characters, and points of view condense into a series of tightly choreographed major scenes performed by principal dancers and supported by a corps de ballet.2 The introduction of the alien Creature into this highly conventional structure of expression makes flesh the spectacle of familial bonds by turns forged and sundered, claimed and renounced, restored and violated. The Frankenstein ballet tells a story of proper familial creation, belonging, recognition, and acceptance gone awry. The ballet—to use Henry James’s narrative [End Page 465] axiom—shows rather than tells the agonizing interrelations that come from parental rejection of a child who differs from the parent and from parental expectations.3 Far from the Tree Andrew Solomon, in his critically acclaimed book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, narrates the lived stories of families that understood themselves as typical or nondisabled until the entry of disabled children who...

‘Looking after them, reading in Homer’: Thomas Goffe’s Turk Plays in Oxford

This article discusses two Turk plays of Thomas Goffe that were performed at Christ Church in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and subsequently printed: the plays present events from late medieval history, but with extensive classical allusion. The article considers the plays’ use of theatrical reference and books as props: these devices may have encouraged a particular response in the academic audiences who first saw these plays, especially influencing their attitude to the Turkish emperors who are fictionalised presentations of historical medieval figures, exotic, religiously and culturally ‘other’, but also made familiar by their contextualisation among the figures of a classical past, the study of which was the foundation of Tudor education.

Humanist Guillaume Budé’s artful rhetoric: responding in kind to Utopia

Guillaume Budé’s prefatory letter to More's Utopia was prominently placed by Erasmus and More. Beneath the letter's disorienting qualities, Budé engages key ideas of Utopia, among them justice, law and lawyers, the “gadfly” of avarice and other sources of political discord, and Christianity and government. Budé’s rhetoric is subtly evocative, particularly in his irony, juxtaposition, and wealth of classical allusions, through which he indicates education of citizens and engaging rhetoric are means toward right government, the pursuit of “Hagnopolis”—an Augustinian Holy City—and ultimately demonstrates the truth, impossibility, and importance of the Utopian isle.

Not Diane: The Risk of Error in Chaucerian Classicism

When Chaucer, Lydgate, and their contemporaries made classical characters and classical allusions an important part of English poetry, they risked confusing scribes and readers. In the vein of recent studies of scribes as readers, this article explores the mistakes of scribes in copying and comprehending those details. In addition, this article explores the ways that poets’ phrasing implies awareness of those risks and seeks to mitigate them. The article thus presents the creation of the text as a coproduction between agents, which might be understood in the framework of pragmatics, the analysis of speech acts in social context. These problems in transmission, and the forestalling of them, first reveal how classicism, which later became a monumental tradition, was a risky interaction in some of its earliest phases in English poetry. Second, more briefly and tentatively, these problems suggest the risks of writing for scribal transmission in general.

Dispensing with Power: A Response to Three Papers on Historical Criticism

The essays printed here all make the case for historical criticism in reasonable and persuasive terms. Professor Weinbrot's paper shows how recovering the meaning that classical allusions, formal word order, and particular loaded phrases had for their original audiences makes us better readers of eighteenth-century novels. One of his examples is the phrase “dispensing power,” which James II claimed in his attempt to remake the monarchy on an autocratic model, and which Samuel Richardson used in a different context while describing Pamela in her “exalted condition.” Further research shows that controversial pamphlets contemporaneous with Richardson's novel discussed the refusal of Quakers to pay tithes by using the same phrase, an intriguing circumstance as Pamela attends a masquerade dressed as a Quaker. Professor Hume's paper details how little we know about many aspects of dramatic history, and rightly criticizes sweeping claims based on sparse data. Although we shall always wrestle with inadequate data, our readers still expect us to speculate, and as long as we do so honestly, labeling our guesses as guesses, what we do is at worst harmless and at best suggestive. If some factual discoveries decisively invalidate earlier readings, others enrich our sense of context while leaving room for different interpretations. Professor Ezell, who describes herself as “quite happy with the constructions of databases and counting things,” correctly rejects the preposterous and increasingly widespread belief that “close reading is … totally inappropriate as a method of studying literary history.” We need to nurture and celebrate scholars who understand the importance of historical evidence, even when that evidence is incomplete, and who also understand the subtleties of rhetorical, cultural, and aesthetic interpretation that remain well beyond the reach of any existing computer program.

Historical Criticism, the Reclamation of Codes, and Repairs to Literary History: The Examples of Fielding and Richardson

Like other earlier authors, Fielding and Richardson place culturally shared “codes” in their texts and exploit those codes for their readers' instruction and delight. The historical critic uses multiple approaches to reclaim what our ancestors knew and what can enlarge modern knowledge and, thereby, modern pleasure. I here try to reclaim lost classical allusions, and use lexicography, textual variants, rape and marriage laws, and social and dynastic history to illumine Tom Jones, Pamela in her Exalted Condition, and Clarissa. The historical critic thus is empirical, inductive rather than agenda-driven, and deductive in method, and is formalist as well as historical in critical practice.

The study on combination of Confucianism and literature from last period of Korea dynasty to first period of Chosun dynasty ― through examine of Classical allusion of 《The Book of Songs》―

The study on combination of Confucianism and literature from last period of Korea dynasty to first period of Chosun dynasty ― through examine of Classical allusion of 《The Book of Songs》―

Why Roman Poets In Modern Guise? Reception Of Roman Poets Since World War I

Why Roman Poets In Modern Guise? Reception Of Roman Poets Since World War I THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI Nietzsche once remarked that translations provide a key to a society’s values. “One can appraise the degree of historical sense that an age possesses by how that age makes translations and seeks to incorporate past ages and books into itself” (La gaya scienza, bk. 2, §83).1 It might be argued that his observation applies a fortiori to adaptations, which unlike translations belong to the very substance of a writer’s oeuvre, offering alternative identities—masks or personae in Ezra Pound’s vocabulary—as a vehicle for the expression of different aspects of the writer’s personality. Indeed, one might well claim that without a knowledge of the classics we are unable fully to grasp or appreciate the achievement of many modern poets in different national literatures —from Ezra Pound to Raoul Schrott, from Paul Valéry to Durs Grünbein. Even writers in whose works the classics play a less predominant role—Thomas Mann, for instance —classical allusions often have a surprising relevance. Reception and adaptation of the classics is to a considerable extent a generational phenomenon. Writers educated in the first half of the twentieth century, when Greek and Latin still commanded a central position in American and European schools and colleges—Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Bertolt Brecht, André Gide, Julien Benda—took the classics for granted, and received their training as a routine component of secondary and higher education, often as classics majors in college or university. They belonged to a generation for whom the classics , as E. H. Gombrich reminisced, had still been “profoundly arion 25.2 fall 2017 assimilated into the tradition of general knowledge.”2 Around the time of World War II the situation changed. “We are the first generation of poets not to study Latin,” observed Donald Hall (born 1928).3 Some writers of his and later generations, to be sure, such as Francesco Vagni in Italy and Raoul Schrott in Austria, and notably the novelists of Catullus—W. G. Hardy (The City of Libertines, 1957), Pierson Dixon (Farewell, Catullus, 1953), Benita Kane Jaro (The Key, 1988), Cornelius Hartz (Excrucior, 2008)—and Petronius —Volker Ebersbach (Der Schatten eines Satyrs, 1985), David Wishart (Nero, 1996), and Luis Antonio de Villena (La nave de los muchachos griegos, 2005)—studied classics, took degrees, and often taught in that field. Others, such as Durs Grünbein, got at least some Latin in secondary school and, while not pursuing it systematically, were motivated for various reasons to return to the classics. New York poet Estelle Gilson, who produced lively adaptations of Juvenal’s satires,4 reports that she was introduced to Juvenal by her husband, who was well read in the classics;5 James Wright came under the influence of John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College; Donald Hall found in Horace the paradigm both for his practice of obsessive revision and for his discursive poems; Robert Pinsky devoted himself to the translation of Dante, whose own indispensable mentor was Virgil; Joseph Brodsky, even though he repeatedly claimed his Latin “stinks,” read Horace’s odes in bed at night.6 Even in the less classically oriented society and culture of the late twentieth century these writers, and others who depended heavily on translations, appreciated the value of the Roman model and used it in their writing. why this often compelling obsession with the Roman past? It is grounded in the Rome analogy that has long dominated the national consciousness in the United States and often in Europe.7 Initially the analogy arose from the belief, still prevalent in the poems of Allen Tate and the Southern Agrarians , that the westering trend of civilization and culture—the why roman poets in modern guise? 16 translatio imperii—that began in Troy and moved with Aeneas to Rome, then continued its trajectory and arrived with the earliest settlers in America. The concept of Romanitas that was common in France and Italy had much the same effect in those countries. (In Germany, dominated since the eighteenth century by what E. M. Butler termed “the tyranny of Greece...

«Рассуждения о цы» («詞論») Ли Цинчжао

The article presents the first Russian translation of “Essay on Ci” with detailed comments. It was written by the outstanding Chinese poetess Li Qingzhao and considered to be the first theoretical treatise dedicated to genre ci. The article revealed that the poetess used three strategies to make a genre demarcation: to legitimise, dichotomise and historicise. To legitimise means to justify that ci is a genre of poetry by identifying the same traits with official poetry shi (e.g. using the classical quotations and allusions). To dichotomise is to determine a core element of genre and oppose it to the other element identifying the similar genre (e.g. music separates ci from shi). To historicise is to develop or discover the unique historical past (e.g. the source of ci is in antiquity). The article also examined the strategy to invent classics: Li Qingzhao wrote the apophatic history of genre ci pointing not to the merits but weaknesses of her predecessors.

The undead past in Kathy Acker’sBlood and Guts in High School

Kathy Acker is known as a radically experimental modern writer, yet her works rely heavily on ancient authors. This article traces classical allusions and borrowings in her novel Blood and Guts in High School to demonstrate the influence of Acker’s philological education on her techniques of plagiarism and destabilized narrative voice. The main character, Janey, first translates several poems of Propertius, switching her identification between the male author, who serves as model for the desiring poet, and his beloved Cynthia, a female speaker. She then meets the ghost of Catullus, who leads her to her death; on the final page of the book is an unattributed version of Sappho fr. 16 V. Acker uses the Roman poets Catullus and Propertius to explore the relationship between author, work, and inspiration, and draws on the Greek poet Sappho to offer a programmatic statement about gender relations and literature.

Son of classics and comics

Introduction. C. W. Marshall and George Kovacs Postmodern Odysseys 1. Odysseus and The Infinite Horizon C. W. Marshall 2. Mythic Totality in Age of Bronze George Kovacs 3. Classical Symbolism in Asterios Polyp Abram Fox and HyoSil Suzy Hwang-Eschelbacher East's Wests 4. Mecha in Olympus: Masamune Shirow's Appleseed Gideon Nisbet 5. [un]Reading the Odyssey in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind Nicholas Theisen 6. Xerxes, Lost City in the Desert: Classical Allusions in Fullmetal Alchemist Sara Raup Johnson All Gaul 7. Re-inventing the Barbarian: Classical Ethnographic Perceptions in Asterix Eran Almagor 8. Asterix and the Dream of Autochthony Stuart Barnett 9. We're not in Gaul Anymore: the Global Translation of Asterix Siobhan McElduff Modern Classics 10. Classical Allusion in Modern British Political Cartoons Ian Runacres and Michael K. Mackenzie 11. Eliot with an Epic, Rowson with a Comic: Recycling Foundational Narratives Frederick Williams and Edward Brunner 12. Ozymandias the Dreamer: Watchmen and Alexander the Great Matthew Taylor 13. And They Call That Poison Food: Desire and Traumatic Spectatorship in the Lucifer Retelling of Genesis Kate Polak Bibliography

The Norman Conquest of the classical past: William of Poitiers, language and history

ABSTRACTWilliam of Poitiers' Gesta Guillelmi, written shortly after the Norman Conquest of England, remains surprisingly neglected, especially by historians. He is generally regarded primarily as a classical stylist who employed classical references to decorate his panegyric of William of Normandy. Poitiers' use of classical allusion was, however, far from superficial. In arguing for William’s legitimacy as king of England, Poitiers addresses a wider audience than is generally acknowledged, and appeals directly to the fears, expectations and values of his day. The article examines his three most sustained allusions to classical heroes of naval enterprises and conquest – Caesar, Aeneas and Theseus – as key components of the memory of the Norman Conquest, demonstrating that each allusion makes a specific moral and political point. Poitiers is a case study for medieval authorial ingenuity in applying classicism to the problems of the present.

Edward II with Related Texts by Christopher Marlowe

Reviewed by: Edward II with Related Texts by Christopher Marlowe Andrew Fleck Christopher Marlowe, Edward II with Related Texts, ed. Stephen J. Lynch (Indianapolis: Hackett 2015) xiv + 156 pp. Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, Edward II, has enjoyed great popularity in the classroom over the last few decades. The play offers teachers of early modern literature the most overt example of homoerotic attraction in the canon. It also repays other kinds of historicist work as well. And it provides a strong counterexample that helps to combat the privileging of Shakespeare on syllabi treating early modern theater and culture; juxtaposing the play with Richard II often helps to open student readers’ eyes to the value of picking up the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Since Marlowe’s play can be found in a variety of modern anthologies and editions, it is worth wondering what another edition of the play might offer to classrooms. Stephen J. Lynch’s new edition for Hackett, Edward II with Related Texts, modernizes the spelling and standardizes the textual accidents, succinctly introduces and contextualizes the tragedy, and appends some useful source and contextual material that might entice undergraduates to historicize the tragedy and its themes. All in all, Lynch offers a usable and affordable classroom edition of Marlowe’s contribution to the Elizabethan history play. Lynch offers three sorts of preliminary material in his edition. He begins with a biographical sketch of Marlowe repurposed from an earlier edition of Marlowe, his Jew of Malta, also for Hackett. Lynch follows this biographical material with a very helpful introduction to Edward II, arranged according to [End Page 305] prominent themes in the tragedy. Most of these return to the nature of Edward’s relationship with his “minion” Gaveston and how the presentation of this obliquely homoerotic connection might structure the play. In addition to this transgressive relationship and its contrast with the queen’s adulterous relationship with Mortimer, the introduction does take up other more overtly political themes in the tragedy, particularly concerning the unruly nobles who chafe at the tyranny of their distracted monarch. Throughout this helpful introduction, Lynch directs his readers to portions of the “Related Texts” included later in the volume that help to illustrate Elizabethan concerns with these topics. The introductory material concludes with a bibliography (current through 2010) and a discussion of Lynch’s editorial practice. Lynch puts his view of the text into practice in a thoroughly annotated, modernized edition of the tragedy. He bases this edition on the first extant printed version of the play, from 1594 (STC 17437), but he does not indicate that he made any use of the derivative 1598 quarto or other early editions. Delving into the putative 1593 edition or mentioning Gaveston’s prominence on the 1598 title page, not to mention the allusion to a revival on the 1622 title page, might be a little recherché for a student edition. The text he offers to readers is usually quite readable. Brief glosses of archaic terms appear in the margins. For longer notes, Lynch provides footnotes with a wealth of information. Some notes offer simple definitions of technical terms, as when Lynch defines the political meaning of a “Protector” (5.2.12) as “a legal title for a lord selected to rule on behalf of a young king” (80). Other notes paraphrase syntactically convoluted lines, as the gloss of “We’ll steel it on their crest and poll their tops” (3.2.27) as “‘We will strike their helmets (with steel swords) and cut off their heads’” (49). Several notes offer helpful clarifications of classical allusions that our students may not recognize, such as “the Cyclops’ hammers” (1.4.313). Still other notes direct readers to Marlowe’s adaptation of his source material or his invention of material that Holinshed omits. Some readers may find a few of the notes intrusive, as when the editor instructs the reader that “Like Isabella, Mortimer misrepresents and exaggerates. Kent did indeed join the queen’s rebellion, but Kent returned his loyalty to Edward before the king was captured and imprisoned (see 4.6.1–18)” (83). But, in general, these notes and glosses will be quite helpful to undergraduates. The final...

Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic

Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic