Classical Literature and its Reception: An Anthology (review)

Over the last decade or so, Blackwell Publishing has established a reputation as the leading UK provider of literary anthologies for classroom use. Several factors – besides a shrewd choice of editors which has ensured a consistently high quality of selection, annotation, and scholarly documentation – have contributed to this success. The rapid proliferation of modular degree courses, together with a widespread shift from tutorial to seminar teaching, rising prices of individual literary texts, the unwillingness of students to buy books, and (in some institutions) a paucity of library resources, have combined to make single textbooks, containing between two covers all the necessary primary material for a particular module and acquired by all students as their one obligatory purchase, an attractive proposition for many university teachers and course directors. And Blackwell's energetic marketing has ensured that the volumes sell in sufficient numbers for unit costs, and therefore prices, to be kept down to reasonable levels.

At the heart of the Blackwell enterprise are substantial period and genre anthologies (on such subjects as 'Restoration Drama', 'Victorian Poetry and Poetics', and 'Seventeenth-Century English Poetry') designed for mainstream historical 'core' modules. The volume under review has more specific focus, and is presumably intended for use on 'special subject' courses. The book's raison d'être is clearly and succinctly established in the editors' introduction. English literature, they observe, abounds both in large-scale adaptations and imitations of the Greek and Roman classics, and in numerous classical contacts of a more local and piecemeal kind. Modern students know little of this classical dimension of the English literary tradition. The deficiency cannot be suppliedby mere handbook or footnote information, since the 'knowledge' required is intimate, first-hand experience of classical literature rather than external data about it. Without such experience, standard references in scholarly editions (of the 'cf. Iliad 12.310–28' kind) are likely to be regarded as learned lumber which can be safely ignored, rather than as enticing invitations to enhanced literary pleasure and understanding.

Classical Literature and its Reception thus sets itself the admirable aim of illustrating and displaying, rather than merely describing, the varietyof contact between classical and English literature. The volume is structured in two parts. Part 1 presents a selection of English, Irish, and Caribbean poems and poetic passages from Chaucer to Seamus Heaney (no prose is included), chosen with particular regard to their classical connections. Part 2 presents a selection of passages from classical literature (mainly poetry, but including here a few prose items), chosen for their connections with the English material in Part 1. Extracts in both parts are fully annotated, and accompanied by headnotes designed to provide basic biographical and contextual information, and to alert readers to salient points of contact between the English and classical items – including, importantly, not only the ways in which English poems display 'classical influence', but those in which English readers' perceptions of classical texts have been significantly altered by English adaptations and reworkings. Tables of cross-references at the end of the volume further facilitate readers' explorations of this two-way contact between English poets and their classical forebears.

Reviewers of anthologies regularly castigate editors for not including items which the reviewers themselves would have selected. This is often unfair. No collection can include everything, and an editor's principles of selection and arrangement may mean that certain items have for good reason been preferred to others which might, at first sight, seem to have an equal, or stronger, or claim to be included. There are, however, certain fundamental features of the structuring and organization of De Maria's and Brown's anthology which make one's reservations about its inclusions and exclusions more than a matter of local or personal preference or priority. The editors' original intention, they tell us, was to present in Part 2 translations from classical authors in modern versions 'that presented no obstacles to the reader, translations that would be transparent, like good prose...