A Companion to Classical Receptions (review)

Reception studies is rapidly becoming one of the most dynamic new specializations in classics. In light of the changing theoretical and methodological climate that has settled in the field of classics as a whole, studies on reception and the classical tradition have become increasingly more nuanced as classicists explore the intricate transmission of classical literature and culture through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and even well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The influence of the classical world finds its way into the very fabric of our Western identity, but non-Western cultures, too, are often confronted with the legacy of the ancients as a symbolic system of otherness at play in those cultures' constructions of self. The result of this recognition is a significant increase in the critical work done on the reception of classical culture.

Since the appearance of my own work on Catullus, Renaissance Petrarchism, and the construction of lyric subjectivity, published just four years ago (Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric [Burlington, Vt. 2004]), a number of substantial books have appeared on classical reception. Paul Allen Miller's Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Columbus, Ohio 2007) and Miriam Leonard's Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford 2005) situate twentieth-century critical and intellectual thought within the tradition and reception of classical philosophy, literature, and politics. Leonard and Vanda Zajko, a contributor to the volume under review here, have also edited a collection of essays entitled Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Oxford 2008), on the reciprocal readings of classical mythology and various threads of feminism. Even my current work on the implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the understanding of humanism, literary tradition, and poetic self-consciousness (particularly as it relates to the seventeenth-century writer and humanist John Milton) represents the movement toward not only locating the classics in later periods but also understanding the complex relationship between the past and present and its pivotal role in modern identity formation.

Fixed firmly at the hub of this exciting period of reception scholarship, Blackwell—as part of its well-established series, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World—has now published a third anthology devoted to the reception of classical literature and culture. Edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, this volume presents a wide-ranging inquiry into the possibilities of reception studies in multiple fields and in multiple literary and cultural periods. The collection is divided into eight main sections, with three to five essays per section, and a concluding ninth section that features a single, longer essay by James I. Porter on the "future prospects" of reception studies. Part 1, "Reception within Antiquity and Beyond," begins with an essay by Felix Budelmann and Johannes Haubold entitled "Reception and Tradition." Budelmann and Haubold offer an introduction to the topic of classical reception within the ancient world by using two case studies from the Anacreontic and Homeric traditions. Barbara Graziosi follows in "The Ancient Reception of Homer" with a discussion of Homer's reception by other "ancients" and the problems in identifying what Homer's influence might mean for various genres not specifically part of the epic tradition. Chris Emlyn Jones gives a particularly insightful look at Plato's reception of Greek drama and the relationship between drama and the "Centre and Periphery" of the Athenian polis. Thomas Harrison looks at both ancient and modern representations of Persia, demonstrating the differences between the ancient representations and later, textual representations as well as modern museum exhibits. Finally, Ruth Webb closes part 1 with a discussion of ancient perspectives on drama and the later impact of Christianity on those perspectives.

Part 2, "Transmission, Acculturation and Critique," examines specifically the transmission of the classical world in the modern era. Seth L. Schein investigates the foundational status of classical culture and the consolidation of...