The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, eds. (review)

This volume is the first to appear of the planned five-volume Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL). It covers the period 1660–1790; still to come are volumes 1 (800–1558), 2 (1558–1660), 4 (1790–1880), and 5 (after 1880). The present volume is edited by the series editors, David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, both of whom are professors emeriti at Bristol University and world-renowned scholars in the literature of the period and in classical reception. Thus, this collection clearly functions as the series’ flagship volume.

Hopkins and Martindale are known for their shared commitment to a hermeneutic/aesthetic approach to reception. Three main characteristics distinguish their approach from others within the field of classical reception and from the broader community of reception scholars; all three are stated as programmatic for the OHCREL project in the preface and the introduction to the present volume.

First, Hopkins and Martindale focus on what they call, unapologetically (even defiantly), “literary texts of high quality” by “great writers,” with visual texts, including comics, films, and theatrical performances, excluded from the category of the literary. Second, they understand writers as readers, and literary texts as creative/critical readings of the ancient texts to which they respond. Third, they understand literary history in terms of a tradition in T. S. Eliot’s sense: not passively inherited but acquired by great labor and actively shaped and reshaped by successive generations of writers. This tradition, they believe, forms a more important context for literary criticism and interpretation than social, political, or book history does; Martindale argues this point cogently at the start of his own contribution to this volume, “Milton’s Classicism.” Overall, in their broader work and in this volume, Hopkins and Martindale theorize reception as a dialogue between two distinct historical periods.

This dialogic and text-based understanding of reception—and, concomitantly, of literary history—leaves its mark both on the organization of this volume and on its contents. In terms of the organization, although all the chapters focus on the use made of classical works by literary writers in the period 1660–1790, all but two chapters are positioned on one side or another of the dialogue. (The two exceptions are discussed in more detail below.) Thus some chapters focus on ancient authors, works, or genres, tracing their presence in works of the period, while others focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors and literary modes and their negotiations with the classics. Consequently, there are three chapters on named authors writing in the period 1660–1790 (“Milton’s Classicism,” “Dryden’s Classicism,” and “Samuel Johnson’s Classicism”), and six on the “afterlife” of ancient authors in the period (“Latin Epic: Virgil, Lucan and Others,” “Homer,” “Ovid,” “Horatianism,” “The Classical Critics,” and “The Ancient Historians in Britain”). Similarly, there are four chapters on specific literary modes of the period (“Travesty and Mock-Heroic,” “The Classics and Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” “The Classics and the English Novel,” and “Discursive and Philosophical Prose”) and six chapters on the impact of ancient literary genres on literature of the period (“Roman Satire and Epigram,” “Pastoral and Georgic,” “Didactic and Scientific Poetry,” “The Epistolary Tradition,” “The Fabular Tradition,” and “Lyric and Elegy”). Inevitably, there is a fair amount of overlap in content: Dryden’s relationship with Horace, for example, is discussed at some length in four separate chapters.

In terms of the content, the individual chapters are successful in direct proportion to their ability to account for the factors that make dialogue between the two periods possible in the first place. In many of the chapters, reception is understood as something that takes place in the mind of a poet. This interior “mindscape” is a transhistorical space, often separate from or even resistant to the poet’s social or historical context: in the chapter on Johnson’s classicism, Freya Johnson defines “classical quotation”’ as...