The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature: Heroes and Eagles ed. by Lisa Maurice (review)

From gods to heroes to beasts, classical mythology has been working its way into children’s literature for a long time. However, the increasing popularity of such works as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has brought new attention to the ways in which these two fields interact, thereby giving rise to this much-needed collection of scholarship. Editor Lisa Maurice has brought together a wide range of scholars who, while all sharing an interest in classical reception studies and children’s literature, present a diverse look into how the ancient world has been received in the latter—not just in prose, but also in video games, picture books, and comics.

In the introduction to the text, Maurice asserts both why this collection matters—that is, why children’s literature is an important place to consider how this fusion with the ancient world occurs—and, more generally, how this work can be approached from a classical reception standpoint. To this end, she devotes a portion of the introduction to explaining the origins of classical reception studies, emphasizing that this discipline views reception as an active dialogic process in which “cultural context [i] s paramount” (7). Therefore, each of the essays in this collection approaches various works of children’s literature through cultural studies, not only observing the ways in which the receiving text draws from the classical world “but also,” as Maurice stresses, approaching the receiving texts “as products of their own society” (7).

The collection concentrates on two areas of adaptation: classical mythology, the focus of its first three sections; and Rome, the focus of the fourth and final one. Part 1, “Classics and Ideology in Children’s Literature,” considers what the treatment of the ancient world in children’s literature indicates about the societies in which such literature emerged. The section begins with an essay by Elizabeth Hale that explores the influence of classical material on the production of the child in Victorian and Edwardian times. Other essays featured in this section include Joanna Paul’s reflection on how the past is used to critique the present in the life and works of E. Nesbit, as well as Katarzyna Marciniak’s examination of the relationship between the antique world as presented in works of Polish children’s literature and the historical contexts in which these works were published.

Part 2, “Ancient Mythology, Modern Authors,” explores the reception of the ancient world in more contemporary texts, beginning with an essay by Barbara Weinlich that compares and contrasts how three mythological figures are represented in two picture books both published in 2002. Weinlick’s contribution is followed by perhaps one of the most pleasantly unexpected essays in the collection, Mary McMenomy’s “Reading the Fiction of Video Games,” which draws from multiple fields to consider how children interact with or receive an understanding of mythology through different video games from the 1980s onward. The final two essays in this section provide insightful readings into popular works of fantasy literature. Maurice surveys the depictions of centaurs in works by such authors as J. K. Rowling and Diana Wynne Jones. And Niall W. Slater draws attention to the role of memory in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, particularly as a way to consider the relationship between past and present, the antique and the modern.

Part 3, “Classical Mythology for Children,” centers on the different ways in which classical myths have been adapted to suit children. Sheila Murnaghan’s look at significant adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first pairs well with the succeeding essay by Geoffrey Miles, which examines eight incarnations of the Odysseus story in the twenty-first century alone. Lastly, revisiting some of the same literary works mentioned by Murnaghan, Deborah H. Roberts considers why there is an overwhelming trend in books of mythology for children to avoid acknowledging Ovid as the...